Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

I first listened to a special group of interviews with African American community elders in Pamlico County almost 20 years ago, but I have never forgotten them. They helped me to see history as more than dates and wars, the rise and fall of the powerful, and the stuff of headlines.

They helped me to understand that history is all those things, but it is also the paths of our souls and the life of the spirit.

The oral history project was called “Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County, North Carolina.”

The project was led by Ms. Linda Simmons-Henry, a scholar, archivist and public historian whom I have known and admired for many years.

Ms. Simmons-Henry was uniquely well prepared to lead the project. At that time, she was the director of special collections and the senior archivist at Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh.

She is currently the dean of the library and archives at Texas College, a historically Black colleges and universities in Tyler, Texas.

She is also a native of New Bern and has always remained deeply attached to the African American community there and in Pamlico County, just to the east of New Bern.

Over the spring and summer of 2007, Ms. Simmons-Henry and a talented team of local volunteers conducted oral history interviews with 20 of Pamlico County’s African American elders.

I found the interviews to be a rare treasure. Taken together, they are a compelling and intimate portrait of African American life in Pamlico County over most of the 20th century.

The whole tenor of the interviews is special. When you listen to them, you can tell that the project’s volunteers and the elders were people who knew and cared for one another.

In the voices of the project’s volunteers, I heard respect and reverence for the elders whom they were interviewing. I also heard a yearning to learn from their wisdom and experience.

In the voices of the elders, I heard a special kind of care. They talk about history, but they also sound like wise grandparents gently sharing love and guidance with those of a younger generation whom they know will need all the help they can get in this fragile, broken world of ours.

* * *

I first listened to the interviews back in 2007. The project’s volunteers had organized a banquet to celebrate and honor the community elders who had so graciously shared their stories with them.

I had been invited to say a few words at that banquet. To help me to prepare for the occasion, Ms. Simmons-Henry made a copy of the interviews for me.

At that time, the project’s volunteers had not yet transcribed the audio tapes, so I could not read transcripts of them. In a way, it was nicer: it meant that I had to listen to them, which I did, and it was a delight.

It made me feel as if I was sitting down with the elders and listening to their stories along with the project’s volunteers.

The interviews and transcripts are now available both at the New Bern-Craven County Public Library in New Bern and in the Southern Oral History Program’s collection at the Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

* * *

The project’s oldest interviewee was a woman named Annie Rachel Squires. She was born in a little community called Maribel, on the Bay River, in 1908. At the time of her interview, she was 99 years old.

Ms. Squires and the other community elders shared stories about many different parts of Pamlico County’s history.

They talked about their teachers and schools. They spoke of childhood joys. They remembered long, brutally hard days of digging in potato fields and shucking oysters in the local canneries.

“All I know about my life was work, work, work,” I remember one woman saying, I believe in Vandemere, a small village in Pamlico County.

The community elders also recounted tales of the local struggle for voting rights and racial justice in Pamlico County.

Some remembered the landmark school desegregation lawsuit that black citizens in the coastal town of Oriental filed in 1951. Two or three recalled incidents involving the Ku Klux Klan.

Others told stories about serving in the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Yet others remembered the Great Depression.

My curiosity encompassed all of those historical subjects, but they are not what I remember most about the interviews.

What struck me most deeply about the elders’ words when I first listened to them back in 2007, and what I still find most unforgettable about them now, is how much they are a history of faith and the spirit.

* * *

For instance, I will never forget the project’s interview with the Rev. Kenneth M. Bell Sr., who at that time was still the minister at the Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Bayboro.

He was the only church pastor whom the project’s volunteers interviewed, but when it came to matters of the spirit, his words were very similar to most of the other elderly men and women that were interviewed.

Like Rev. Bell, they spoke of their faith and their struggles to know and understand God more fully.

They shared stories of Sunday schools and Bible study groups. They described a hunger to understand more fully what Scripture had to teach them about our purpose here on Earth, the nature of our existence, and what we are called to do for one another.

Rev. Bell was interviewed by Ms. Sandra Mae Hawkins, one of the project’s most devoted volunteers. At one point in the interview, she asked Rev. Bell what he considered the most important event in his life.

He did not hesitate for even a second.

He said it was the day in his boyhood that Mrs. N.F. Harper sang “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior” at Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church and he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior.

* * *

When Rev. Bell spoke of Mrs. Harper singing “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior,” he was remembering a worship service 60 or 70 years earlier.

Born in Bayboro in 1941, he was the youngest of 12 children.

When Sandra Made Hawkins talked with him, he explained that he had grown up in hard times. However, he did not linger on his family’s hardships or the things they did without.

Instead, he talked about his father, who was a farmer and a devout member of the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

His father was not the pastor of the church, but he had been a missionary. Rev. Bell explained that when his father was not in his fields, he strove to live the Bible’s teachings.

He visited the sick, lonely, and down and out. He cut firewood for elderly neighbors. After hog killings, he shared the meat with those who had none.

In the interview, Rev. Bell recalled that his father’s face had been disfigured in a hunting accident when he was a boy.

When I heard that part of his life story, I wondered if his father’s malformity had helped to teach him, and maybe his son too, to look at people’s souls, not on that which is only skin deep.

Rev. Bell remembered that people in Pamlico County often referred to his father as a prophet. He said that his father understood how to listen for God’s word, and again and again, God spoke to him. God made him promises, and those promises, Rev. Bell said, came true.

He was not describing the world that we watch on TV or read about in the New York Times: he was describing a world where miracles happened.

 “He never talked much to us except about the Bible,” Rev. Bell recalled.

He spoke with great admiration and appreciation for his father. On the other hand, listening to his interview, I also got the feeling that he felt as if his father may have left some important things unsaid.

* * *

I was also taken with the project’s interview with a gentleman named Charlie Styron. Mr. Styron was born in Oriental in 1933.

I wish I had known him. He spoke with a beautiful voice, full of kindness.

In reflecting on his life, Mr. Styron described how he had always worked with his hands. Listening to him talk about his life, I got the impression that there was not much that he could not do with those hands.

For many years, he had worked at a sawmill and a veneer plant. But at different times, he explained, he had made his living as a heavy equipment operator, a bricklayer, a carpenter, and an electrician.

After he retired, he said, he found his greatest joy in playing with his grandchildren. He kept active, too. At the time of the interview, he was still operating a lawn mower repair business out of his home.

Passersby often saw him singing hymns and praying while he worked on the lawnmowers.

Sandra Mae Hawkins was also the project interviewer who spoke with Mr. Styron.

When she asked him, “What have been some important events of your life?” he, like Rev. Bell, did not hesitate even for a moment: “Well, to be born from above, that was the most important event,” he told her.

* * *

The project’s interview with a woman named Eula Felton Monk also stood out to me. Ms. Monk had grown up in Mesic, a rural, predominantly African American community on the Bay River.

I had a good friend there when I was young, Ed Credle, who was Mesic’s first mayor. Listening to Ms. Monk’s stories gave me a special joy because they brought back memories of Ed and his neighbors whom I got to know in Mesic back in those days, good people, all.

When Ms. Monk was a girl, she recounted, her father had been the captain of a shrimp trawler. He worked on the Bay River and out in Pamlico Sound, but he also followed the shrimp as far south as Key West.

At the time of her interview, Mrs. Monk had been a teacher for 43 years. She had retired from teaching full-time, but she was still working part time as a substitute teacher in the local public schools.

When asked about her childhood, she recalled long days of working in the fields: chopping cotton, digging potatoes, picking tobacco.

Her family worked on local farms, but also traveled to fields as far away as Merritt, Arapahoe and Aurora.

She spoke of her schoolteachers with great reverence. She had endless admiration for how they did so much, and cared so much for their students, back in those days of Jim Crow when Pamlico County’s schools were segregated by race and so little was given to the African American schools.

Mrs. Monk said that she would never forget the great debt that she owed those teachers.

When the interviewer asked her if she was religious, she, too, was matter of fact:

“I believe in God and I believe in being a doer of His word…, (and I) try very hard to do those things daily that He says that I should do in His world.”

The interviewer then asked a question with a kind of directness with respect to faith and religion that I do not often see in oral history projects.

She asked if Mrs. Monk believed in Jesus Christ.

Mrs. Monk was not caught off guard by the question in the least, and her reply was direct:

 “Oh, yes I do, as my Lord and my Savior. He is my Savior. Yes.”

When the interviewer asked her how she put her faith into action in her daily life — another question I do not often hear in oral history interviews — Mrs. Monk turned to Scripture.

“Second Timothy 2:15 says to study to show thyself approved of God, not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. I study the word of God, and then I pray.”

She also said:

“And the Bible says we should visit the sick…, the Bible says that we should reach out to those who are less fortunate than we are… and to love thy neighbor as thyself.”

She said that she strove to do all those things, though of course she acknowledged that she was far from perfect.

Then she said:

“I love God with all my heart and all my mind, and all my soul. And I would like to say, the greatest point in my life, the most important event in my life, is when I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, when I became saved.”

* * *

As I listened to their voices, I found a comforting sense of familiarity in the way that the lives of the Pamlico County elders were entwined so tightly and so seamlessly with their faith and their churches.

I grew up just across the river from Pamlico County, and I found that their voices reminded me again and again of home and the lives of my family and the people around whom I was raised.

* * *

There was a kind of cadence to the stories of their lives, like a gentle heartbeat, held steady by their knowledge of themselves as spiritual beings and kept in time by daily prayer, Bible study, worship services, Sunday school, church suppers, choir practices, baptism, weddings and funerals.

So many little things in these interviews caught my attention, and they did so in a way that, even all these years later, they remained fixed in my memory.

Listening to the interview with Annie Squires, the 99-year-old woman I mentioned earlier, I could feel how her heart filled with joy when she played the piano at her church in Maribel.

She told the young woman who interviewed her that she had been the church’s pianist for more than half a century.

Likewise, in my mind’s eye, I could see Roosevelt Stokes Jr., another of the interviewees, as he made his weekly rounds among the frail and sick in Grantsboro’s nursing home.

He had never been a pastor or a missionary at a church, but he had his own ministry visiting those people who lived in the nursing home.

On the days of his nursing home visits, Mr. Stokes would stop and read the Bible to any of the patients who desired him to do so.

He would hold their hand, and often they would pray together. Sometimes one of the nurses would join them.

His words brought back memories for me, and maybe helped me appreciate what it was like for Mr. Stokes to read the Bible by those bedsides, and how much it might have meant to those who lay there. Because, now and then, I have been called on to read the Bible at a bedside, too.

* * *

I know these are just little moments, but even some of the passing comments in the interviews made a deep impression on me.

For instance, another of the interviewees, Emma Bell, recalled how, when she was a small child, her mother began every day by giving a Bible verse to her and to each of her brothers and sisters.

They would read the Bible passage at breakfast.

I could see them: a mother and her children, early in the mornings of what I am sure were busy days, taking a few minutes to recite Bible verses before going out into this stormy world of ours.

I also loved a little something that one of the other interviewees, Sabia Ruth Gibbs, said.

Ms. Gibbs grew up in Maribel. Way up in her 90s, she was one of the oldest people who shared her life story with the project’s volunteers.

All the same, when she was asked to pause for a moment and think about the long span of her life, one of the first things she did was reach far back in time, as if to another world, and describe the joy of singing in the choir at St. Galilee Missionary Baptist Church when she was a girl.

She remembered it like it was yesterday.

It was a memory, in her telling of it, that seemed to be made of pure light.

* * *

I doubt that I am much different from anyone else. When I am driving through the countryside, as I did last night, on my way to my family’s homeplace on state Highway 101, I go by all the homes and see the lights on and I wonder how the people that live there are doing, and do they feel loved, and, if they pray, what they pray for at night before they fall asleep.

I wonder about their prayers, and all that goes unsaid in life, and the whispered words we have between us and our maker.

At those times, I think about the quiet joys for which we show gratitude at that late night hour. I think too of the fears that go unsaid everywhere else, the dreams that we keep to ourselves, the hungers that can’t be put into words.

The interviews in “Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County, North Carolina” are an invaluable historical record of life on the North Carolina coast throughout the 20th century.

The more times that passes, the more special they will seem, the more important they will be.

I cherish them for that reason but also because they help me to remember that our path through life, our history, is partly what can be seen and heard and touched, and partly what cannot.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

Earlier today, March 20, I gave a lecture at the annual Whales and Whaling Symposium in Beaufort. It is a special event, and one that I treasure.

Sponsored by the Bonehenge Whaling Center, which is part of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, the symposium invites scientists, historians, and the public to come together and share their knowledge of whales and the history of whaling on the North Carolina coast and throughout the Atlantic.

My lecture was titled “Nye’s Clock Oil and the Bottlenose Dolphin Fishery at Hatteras Island.”

The photograph above was one of the illustrations that I used in my lecture. It shows one of the crews that was hunting bottlenose dolphins on Hatteras Island in the winter of 1907 to 1908.

This crew worked for the William F. Nye Co., a New Bedford, Massachusetts, firm that operated a bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island between 1907 and 1928.

Arising in New Bedford when it was the whale oil capital of the world, the William F. Nye Co. was the country’s largest maker of highly specialized whale and dolphin oils uniquely suited for lubricating clocks, watches, chronometers, scientific instruments, and other delicate machinery.

The company did not obtain those oils from whale blubber, but from two anatomical structures only found in the heads of bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales, belugas and other small-toothed whales.

Specifically, the William F. Nye Co.’s “oilers” extracted those oils from the fatty tissues in the animals’ lower jawbones and from an organ in their foreheads that is called the “melon.” 

Both play central roles in the echolocation ability of those whales and dolphins. That is, they are key to the way that they navigate, find prey and generally “see” underwater by emitting sound waves and interpreting their echos when they reflect off objects around them.

On Hatteras Island, the company’s workers butchered the dolphins on the beach. They then did a small degree of refinement at a facility on Durant’s Island, a knoll on the sound side of the island.

They then shipped the oil to the company’s factory in New Bedford for far more extensive refining.

Between the American Civil War, which spanned from 1861 to 1865, and 1900, the William F. Nye Co. acquired the largest part of its supply of those oils from pilot whale strandings on Cape Cod and Long Island.

In many of those cases, local fishermen herded the whales into shallow waters where they were trapped and grounded.

To establish a more stable supply of those oils, William F. Nye’s son Joseph came south and established the bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island in 1907. He recruited local fishermen and seafarers, many of whom had been involved in earlier bottlenose fisheries on Hatteras.

Hatteras Island was the site of the oldest and longest running bottlenose dolphin fishery in North America.

At the National Museum of Natural History’s Paleobiology Archive, I found records indicating that there had been a commercial bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island on and off since at least 1851.

To oversee the Hatteras fishery, Joseph Nye employed a third-generation Hatteras oiler, William C. Rollinson.

Rollinson had been involved in hunting bottlenose dolphins most of his life, as had his father and grandfather before him.

His father, John W. Rollinson, had been superintendent of a bottlenose dolphin fishery at Hatteras that had been operated by a company based in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1880s and 1890s.

Even further back in time, his grandfather had been captain of a bottlenose dolphin crew at Hatteras Island before the Civil War.

It was hard, dirty work. When I was younger, and some of the men were still alive, they described it as a very grim business, the kind of job that one only did if there was no other way to make a living. But that was often the case on Hatteras Island in those days.

The William F. Nye Co.’s bottlenose dolphin fishery remained on Hatteras Island until 1928 or 1929.

I do not want to give the whole story away here, but if you want to learn more, the North Carolina Maritime Museum has already posted my lecture on its YouTube channel.

The whole symposium was wonderful. The amazing Vicki Szabo, who teaches at Western Carolina University, gave a fascinating presentation on the extensive mythology and scientific knowledge of whales in Medieval Iceland and other parts off the North Atlantic.

Keith Rittmaster, the founder and driving force behind the museum’s Bonehenge Whaling Center, gave an extremely informative overview of the 35 species of cetaceans that have been documented on the North Carolina coast.

Keith also discussed the conservation challenges ahead for whales and dolphins on our coast, and he charted some the exciting, day in and day out work that is happening at the Bonehenge Whaling Center, also in Beaufort.

Another exciting presentation was by marine biologist Tommy Tucker of the Coastal Studies Center on Cape Cod. With a contagious passion, they are devoted to understanding and raising public awareness of the critically endangered Rice’s whale, which is only found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Their presentation was brilliant. In addition to studying Rice’s whales, Tommy also uses arts and crafts to nurture interest in them, including this tapestry in which each depiction of a Rice’s whale represents one of the 51 Rice’s whales currently known to be surviving in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of these presentations are now available on the museum’s YouTube channel. I don’t know about mine, but the presentations by Vicki, Keith, and Tommy are not to be missed!

I found the whole day inspiring. It was so encouraging to be at a museum where the staff are so dedicated to telling the story of North Carolina’s coastal history and do so in such a professional way.

The museum’s auditorium was full of people from many walks of life, including scientists, historians, students, fishermen and women, and all sorts of other lovers of whales and the sea.

All were coming together to discover more about these glorious creatures of the sea and what we might do to make sure that they are still here to inspire and enthrall our children and grandchildren.

It was a joy to be part of it.

* * *

The Bonehenge Whale Center was built by volunteers dedicated to marine conservation, education, and research on the whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the North Carolina coast. You can learn more about the Center’s remarkable work and how you might contribute to it here.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at Duke Law School on the history of the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 and how it shaped our political system, our society, and our legal system here in North Carolina.

I always have to brace myself a bit to give that lecture: It is grim tale, one of the darkest chapters in my home state’s history, and I do not think that anyone could find a silver lining to the story.

Nonetheless, I rarely decline an invitation to give that particular lecture: the subject is just too important.

By almost any measure, the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 is the most important event in North Carolina’s history over the last 150 years.

No event did more to shape our 20th century. None has done more to shape the world in which we live today.

None tells us more about why so many people today feel so helpless to mend the brokenness in our society.

None has more to teach us about how and why we, as a people, have come to feel so torn asunder and divided from one another.

None that I can think of speaks more directly to why so many working people today, of all races, find themselves shunted aside.

And yet, despite its central role in the state’s history, the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 remains largely unknown to the vast majority of North Carolina’s citizens.

To my knowledge, no book, documentary, or museum exhibit has ever focused on the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 as a whole.

Neither does any historical marker tell its story. Nor does any monument or memorial stand as a warning to us today.

With few exceptions, our schoolchildren are not taught about it.

In much the same way as I was at their age, our students are kept in the dark about one of the chapters in North Carolina’s history that they most need to understand if they are going to have a chance to make a better world than they have inherited.

-2-

In the last few years, I have given one version or another of my lecture on the history of the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 at colleges and universities, high schools, community centers, book clubs, and Sunday school classes.

I am always surprised how people respond to it. If you grew up in North Carolina as I did, you were not taught anything at all about the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900.

At most, we were taught a thing or two, probably incorrect, about what we now call the Wilmington Massacre of Nov. 11, 1898.

The Wilmington Massacre was the worst atrocity committed by the white supremacists. However, the murder of so many of Wilmington’s black citizens and the takeover of the city’s government was only a small and in some ways far from central chapter in the state’s white supremacist movement.

The white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 did not arise in Wilmington.

None of its most important instigators came from Wilmington. Few of the wealthy bankers, industrialists, and attorneys who were its leaders and principal financiers came from Wilmington.

The white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 also drew only a small percentage of its supporters from Wilmington.

As a case in point, the white supremacists organized more than 900 “white supremacy clubs” in North Carolina in the spring and summer of 1900.

This is the mission statement of the white supremacy clubs as written by one of the movement’s leaders, an attorney and future United States senator named Furnifold Simmons, in the winter of 1900:

“The purpose of the organization shall be to fully restore and make permanent in North Carolina the SUPREMACY of the WHITE RACE and to develop in the state’s citizens a belief in the necessity of establishing and maintaining WHITE SUPREMACY, as the only hope for the preservation of our civilization.”

Not more than one percent of those “white supremacy clubs” were organized in Wilmington.

In that same summer of 1900, at least two dozen white militia groups called Red Shirts operated in North Carolina. They were the militant wing of the white supremacy movement, and they terrorized both Black voters and white citizens who stood with Black voters.

At most, only one of the Red Shirt militias was based in Wilmington.

Similarly, In 1900, the white supremacy movement’s leadership organized a speakers bureau that included more than 100 individuals.

If an individual volunteered to be part of the speakers bureau, he – they were all men – would accept assignments to speak at white supremacy rallies and at meetings of local white supremacy clubs.

Those speakers included past and future governors, several former and future U.S. senators and congressmen, and a large contingent of former and future district, superior, and state supreme court judges.

None of the white supremacy movement’s most popular orators were from Wilmington.

All of which is to say: We cannot say too much about the Wilmington Massacre. Its story was silenced for too long.

But at the same time, we have to keep our eyes on the prize, which to me, in this case, means focusing on the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 overall and how it shaped our state then and now.

We have to remember something that we were not taught, but know now: in 1898-1900, white supremacists took over the state of North Carolina.

They took control of its legislature, its governorship and all its state agencies. They took over its judiciary, its towns and cities, and every one of the state’s public colleges and schools.

As you can tell from the illustrations that I am featuring here, these were not people to whom I am retroactively applying the term “white supremacy.”  These were people who referred to themselves as white supremacists.

Who ran on the “White Supremacy Ticket.” Who joined “white supremacy clubs.” Who sang the “White Supremacy Song.”

Who celebrated “White Supremacy Day.”

Who carried white supremacy flags, wore white supremacy political buttons, and marched with banners proclaiming “White Supremacy.”

Whose leaders said things like:

“The Anglo Saxon planted civilization on this continent and wherever this race has been in conflict with another race, it has asserted its supremacy and either conquered or exterminated the foe. This great race has carried the Bible in one hand and the sword [in the other]. Resist our march of progress and civilization and we will wipe you off the face of the earth.”

William A. Guthrie, Oct. 28, 1898

Once in control of the state, the white supremacists methodically set about embedding the primacy of white supremacy and a deep distrust of fair elections and the democratic process in our municipal, county, and state government institutions and policies, as well as in our state’s economic and civic life.

As I discussed with the Duke law students, that is one of the reasons that attorneys played such a central role in the white supremacy movement in 1900. After taking power in 1898, the movement transitioned from taking power to institutionalizing white supremacy in North Carolina’s laws and civic life.

Writing the laws of white rule, revising the electoral process, and centralizing control in Raleigh, rather than at the local level, was the work of attorneys.

The white supremacists were extremely successful.

They were so successful, and the breadth of their success was so great that, in the following decades, dissent was almost unheard of. In the decades after 1900, I have yet to find historical evidence of a single one of our state’s political, business, or religious leaders, on any end of the political spectrum, who raised their voice against white supremacy.

In fact, the leaders of the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 became our heroes. North Carolina’s leaders built statues to them. They named college buildings after them. They dedicated historic sites in honor of them.

Over time, and the passing of the generations, their way of thinking about the world, and the divisions they erected between us and our neighbors, began to be taken for granted. We could not remember a different kind of life. We lost sight of the possibility that a person’s race one day might not matter or that there might be a better way to treat one another.

We could not imagine that there could be a different kind of world than that into which we were born.

We forgot that we do not have to be so scared of one another. That we do not have to be so fractured.

We did not even dream anymore that we could be the kind of people that look out for one another and are there for our neighbors, no matter who they are or where they were born or who or how they love.

We could not imagine that we are all in this hard, hard life together, and that we might have been put here to help one another get through it.

-3-

The students at the law school were wonderful. They were engaged, curious, serious, and kind-hearted.

One even seemed to be worried about me. She wondered if I found it hard to study and talk about such dark moments in our history.

I do not. I am far too old for that. But I appreciated her thoughtfulness, and I found it very endearing.

Inevitably, the students were astonished and perhaps somewhat shaken by the similarities between the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 and what is happening in America today.

I have come to see that as only natural. When I give this lecture, I do not draw explicit comparisons between the past and the present. However, the similarities are so striking that, on learning about 1898 to 1900, people of all ages inevitably see parallels between that time and ours.

Sometimes, like when I gave a version of this lecture at a Raleigh high school a few weeks ago, I can literally feel the sudden change of mood in the room as it dawns on the students that this is not just a history lesson but is about their lives and the struggles that they have ahead to make this a better world.

At those times, I can feel a kind of breathlessness in the room. Everything gets more serious.

Sometimes students who had not done so take out their notebooks and start taking notes for the first time in the lecture.

Then we can really get down to work. Then we begin to put our heads together and go beyond what I know.

That is when it gets really interesting and exciting for me.

The young people often see things that I do not, and they often make connections that I had not previously made.

Many times, they find far more lessons in the past that bear on our lives and our struggles to make a better world today than I had ever imagined.

At those moments, I am filled with hope. Their intellectual seriousness, their moral courage, and their refusal to accept an America that seems to have given up on being good or noble lifts me up.

And even if none of us by ourselves has all the answers — I certainly do not — I find every gathering where people come together to consider how we got here, and how we might contribute to making a better future for our children and grandchildren, tremendously uplifting.

I find that to be true whether I am in a crowded college auditorium, a high school classroom, or a table for six at a senior center.

It is always worth doing.

As James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

In May of 1938, a young woman named Muriel L. Wolff spent several weeks interviewing people in Terra Ceia, a community of Dutch immigrants, African Americans, and other settlers who had all come to that part of the North Carolina coast to try to make a new home in hard times.

When she went to Terra Ceia, Wolff was working for the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that employed writers who were struggling during the Great Depression. Some wrote guidebooks; others, like Wolff, documented American life and history.

Wolff talked with all kinds of people while she was in Terra Ceia. She then came back to her home in Chapel Hill and wrote a chronicle of her time there and what she had learned.

In that account, Wolff also included at least partial transcripts of the interviews that she had conducted in Terra Ceia.

Some time ago, I found the original copy of Muriel Wolff’s writings on Terra Ceia in the Federal Writers’ Project Papers at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Wolff opened her report with these words:

“About twelve miles from the blue waters of the Pamlico Sound in Beaufort County there lies an area of drained swamp land, so rich that it was once given the name ‘Heavenly Earth’ although the people who live there facetiously call the region `The Dismal.’

“Oddly enough, both names fit because it is a community of sharp contrasts.

“There are comfortable, well-built houses with all conveniences and there are miserable little shacks that seem to be falling apart; there are big dairy farms with 60, 70, or a 100 cows, but many families do not possess even one; on the vast, black fields, thousands of bushels of potatoes and corn, grain and beans are grown, yet laborers steal because they are hungry.”

That was during the last years of the Great Depression, but I guess some things have not changed: that seems very much like the world in which I grew up, and also very much like the world in which we live now.

-2-

When Muriel Wolff went to Terra Ceia, she was still quite young. She was born in Concord, between Greensboro and Charlotte, in 1910, so she was only 28 years old at the time.

Her passion was for the theater. She began her acting career at North Carolina College for Women, now UNC-Greensboro, where she appeared in student productions between 1926 and 1928.

After leaving Women’s College, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She then came back south and join the Carolina Playmakers, the well-known repertory company based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

She toured with the Playmakers from 1929 to 1931. At that time, the troupe was writing, producing, and performing plays set in some of North Carolina’s most hardscrabble communities: the state’s cotton mill villages, its tobacco farming hamlets, its mountain hollows.

One of Wolff’s most memorable roles was the lead in the original cast of “Strike Song,” a play that was set against the backdrop of a textile workers’ strike in the Carolina Piedmont.

In “Strike Song,” Wollf played “Lily May Brothers,” the most dynamic and inspiring of the strike’s leaders.

Her character was modeled after Ella May Wiggins, a 29-year-old mother, songwriter, and labor activist who was murdered in retaliation for her union activism in Gastonia, in September 1929.

Sometime in 1931, Wolff evidently found that she could not make a living with the Playmakers and took a job as secretary to William T. Couch, the director of the University of North Carolina Press.

However, she continued to moonlight with the Playmakers and to act in local experimental theater for most of the 1930s.

Her work with Couch led to her job with the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1938, in addition to his job at UNC Press, Couch was also serving as the southern director of the Federal Writers’ Project.

In that capacity, Couch employed Muriel Wolff to conduct a series of oral history interviews in Terra Ceia.

In all likelihood, he had first heard of Terra Ceia through several recent magazine and newspaper stories that had featured the community’s Dutch immigrants and their flower farms.

In the 1930s, when other cash crops seemed lacking, a number of Dutch immigrants in Terra Ceia had turned to growing flowers on a commercial scale.

Before long, the sight of their broad fields of tulips, iris, and daffodils began to attract crowds of visitors to the little community in the spring.

-3-

Terra Ceia’s roots reached back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the Roper Lumber Co. and the Norfolk & Southern Railroad worked hand in hand to clearcut and drain hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin swamp forest on that part of the North Carolina coast.

A pair of brothers, John A. and Samuel Wilkinson, were the driving force behind the founding of Terra Ceia.

They were farmers in a little crossroads community called Wilkinson (named, of course, after their family), a few miles east of Terra Ceia. They bought thousands of acres of cutover land from the Roper Lumber Co. and drained and burnt off what was left of the swamp forest.

Once the forest was gone, the Wilkinson brothers marketed the reclaimed swampland to farmers. They took special pains to recruit white Midwesterners, many of them immigrants.

Soon after arriving in Terra Ceia, Wolff and a young local woman, Margaret Respess, rode horseback out to Wilkinson to visit Sam Wilkinson, the only one of the brothers who still lived in the area. He was farming on the land where he and his brother had grown up.

The little settlement was not much more than Sam Wilkinson’s house, broad plains of farmland, a crowd of shacks where farmworkers lived, and a general farm supply and grocery store owned by the Wilkinson family.

-4-

Sitting down with Muriel Wolff in the store, Sam Wilkinson told her about the birth of Terra Ceia.

He told her:

“When I was a boy all that land over there wasn’t anything but swamp. It was full of great big cypress and juniper trees timber that never had been cut. Well, back in 1905, I was working for the Roper Lumber Company, located over in Belhaven, and they started logging that swamp.

“To do that, they had to dig ditches and drain off some of the water, but it still wasn’t fit for anything when me and my brother bought up 20,000 acres in 1911.

“The first thing ever put in that land was stick corn—you know what that is, don’t you? You just stick a hole in the ground, drop in a grain of corn and cover it up. That corn was put in before the stumps were cleared or the land really drained, but it produced between 15 and 20 bushels an acre.

“That’s when the stories got started about how rich the land was over there.

“If you don’t believe we spent the money, I’ll tell you what we had to do. That was swamp land, remember, and ditches wouldn’t drain off all the water. There had to be 40 miles of canals besides the ditches.

“We paid $20,000 for a dredge to dig canals. It broke after the first seven miles. We bought another but it broke too before we finished.

“Then we had to put through a branch line of the railroad — 11 miles of it at $1,000 a mile. Before we could lay a track, we had to buy the right of way and buy $70,000 worth of Norfolk & Southern stock. But we got the railroad through. There it is today.

“Our original plan was to get the land in a good state for cultivation, divide it into 50-acre plots and make it available to poor people and give them a long time to pay for it. We might have been able to do this, if we hadn’t had some more bad luck.

“My brother and I both had stock in the Roper Lumber Company, and it burned without being covered with a cent of insurance.

“Another trouble was land fires. A lot of that land over at Terra Ceia is peat soil and once it gets on fire you can’t hardly put it out. When you do get it to stop smoldering, it’s been ruined.

“All the reverses we had made it impossible for us to carry out our plan. We didn’t have any capital left…. There’s been a sight of money spent on Terra Ceia, and there was a time when money was made there, when land that first sold for $15 to $20 an acre brought $200 to $300 an acre.”

Wilkinson made clear that those days were long gone. “Well, we got experience, but it cost us mighty high,” Wolff quoted him.

He then walked out of the store and across the yard to his house to have his dinner before he headed back into the fields.

-5-

On another morning, a local farm woman named Odell Snows took Wolff to visit a Mrs. Tantrelle in Terra Ceia. Tantrelle was the wife of an Italian immigrant who managed a large farm for a group of northern investors. Wolff was taking room and board with the Snows family.

“It was mid-morning when we started out in the new Plymouth,” Wolff wrote.

“The Snows live in a small settlement which might be called the center of Terra Ceia. Here is the only store run by a white in the community, here the Christian church and the Dutch church which was once the schoolhouse.

“We drove down the dusty road. On one side of it a few scattered houses stood in bare dirt on the edge of the fields; along the other side ran the canal and the railroad track, beyond which were fields.

“Odell drove slowly and explained the landscape. `Negro tenants live in that house, and there too. Yes, most of them are Negroes, except in that place. They’re some white tenants of Mr. Radcliffe’s.

“`An Italian man lives in the place there by that big barn. They say he can write music and poetry and play any kind of instrument.

“`See how far down from the road this land is? I can remember when it was almost level with the road, but it’ s burned down that far.’”

She was referring to the effects of peat fires on the landscape in Terra Ceia. In some places, the layer of peat beneath the swamp forest had been 10 and 12 feet deep, so that when it burned off it left the roads far higher than the surrounding fields and pastures.

In her report, Wolff continued to quote Odell Snows.

“`Now down here is the land owned by that Winston-Salem man who doesn’t do no farming at all. He just ships the dirt. His overseer has a gang of Negro men working most all the time, digging up the dirt, packing it in bags and loading it on that freight car that stands over on the siding.’”

“`When they have a carload (of the peat soil),’” Wolff continued, still quoting Odell Snow, “`the train will come through and pick it up. They say he gets a good price from people who buy the soil to put on their lawns and gardens. It’s so rich I guess it takes the place of fertilizer.’”

She went on:

“When we had come about a mile down the road from Odell’s, we crossed the canal to turn into the road where the Tantrelles lived. Built by a Northern company many years before, this little settlement had an overgrown, uncared for look which was still somehow picturesque.

“About a dozen steep-roofed cottages were spaced along both sides of a shady road and a canal bordered with sycamore trees. We left the car in the road and reached the Tantrelle’s house by way of a bridge that arched over the canal where several ducks were swimming.”

-6-

The settlers in Terra Ceia had taken many different paths to that part of the North Carolina coast.

As Wolff went about doing her interviews for the Federal Writers’ Project, she found that many of the black families in Terra Ceia had come from the east side of the Pungo River, in Hyde County.

They were largely the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African Americans who had been enslaved laborers along the shores of the Pamlico Sound before the Civil War.

While in Terra Ceia, Wolff also met people—white people— from Appalachia and others from as far away as Iowa, Kansas, and Michigan. At least a couple were Italian immigrants. More were Dutch immigrants.

In her report, Wolff described meeting a husband and wife from Mt. Airy, N.C., in the Appalachian foothills. She met another couple from near Bryson City, N.C., in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Still another couple had come all the way from Kansas City.

Yet another husband and wife that she met were Dutch immigrants who had first settled in the Midwest.

Things had not worked out for them there, so they had left and moved a thousand miles east to the North Carolina coast, not to Terra Ceia at first, but to a farm colony called New Holland.

New Holland was located on the southern shore of Lake Mattamuskeet, 45 miles east of Terra Ceia. It had not lasted long. The colony’s fate had depended on a grand scheme to drain the lake and turn it into farmland, but the lake had turned out not to be so easy to do away with.

Like countless others trying to find a home in the 1930s, when so many lives were tossed and turned about, the Dutch family pulled up roots again. They left New Holland and put their hopes for a new life in Terra Ceia.

The Great Depression had been hard on all of those people. All of them were trying to make a new beginning.

-7-

I found Muriel Wolff to be at her best as a writer when she was chronicling small moments. She often recalled even the briefest encounters with a kind of grace and beauty that made them memorable.

One of those was a visit with an African American woman named Sarah Lovett.

Sarah Lovett and her husband, the Rev. James “Jim” Lovett, lived in White Six, a settlement of mainly African American families on the eastern side of Terra Ceia, on the old dirt road that led to Pantego.

In the Fall 2010 issue of the Beaufort County Community College’s wonderful oral history journal, Life on the Pamlico, one of the college’s students quoted her mother, saying: “We lived in an area known as White Six. It was given that name because it was a predominantly black neighborhood, but there were six white families that live on farms in the area.”

Most of the black residents of White Six worked in the local flower fields as often as they could get work in them.

The Lovetts were both from Hyde County, but had moved to White Six when times had gotten hard on that side of the Pungo River.

When they first arrived in White Six, the Rev. Lovett had made a decent living as a barber, which I imagine he did in addition to working in the fields. That was before the Great Depression, and he and Sarah had even been able to save up enough money to buy a bit of farmland.

In addition to barbering and working in the fields, James Lovett was the minister at one of the two African American churches in White Six.

Wolff wrote:

“On one of his plots of black earth, Jim Lovett built a small white house and Sarah… coaxed thin little borders of verbena, roses, and privet to grow along the edges of the bare front yard.

“It was in this yard that Sarah stood with me one fresh May morning, while three small boys and one girl looked up at us with solemn black eyes.”

“Sarah’s voice was as soft and charming as her personality,” Wolff wrote.

“She had a way of cocking her head to one side and squinting at the sky as she talked.”

The Depression Years — and a late freeze that spring — had been devastating to the people in White Six, Sarah Lovett told Wolff.

“`I work in the field by the day, when I can get it. Everybody was mighty hurt this year when the flower crop froze. It knocked so many out of work — especially the women folks. Out here in White Six, where most of them work by the day, it’s been a hard spring.’”

Sarah Lovett continued, “`Two of these little children I’m keeping today belong to a neighbor of mine who’s been sitting at home worrying for a month because there wasn’t nothing for her to do. Today she got a job digging iris. That will bring her a dollar for every day she works.’”

Sarah Lovett told Wolff that, unlike some other settlements around Terra Ceia, at least most of her neighbors in White Six could put food on the table for their children, even if it wasn’t always much.

She said, “’It’s a good thing so many of the White Six people own their own houses and enough ground to have a garden, some chickens, and hogs. They manage to raise most of what they have to eat, anyway.’”

I could almost see the two women there in Sarah Lovett’s kitchen, the humble cottages of White Six all around them, the endless fields, the great labyrinth of canals leading down into the sea.

There, with the sunlight coming in the window, they talked about life and told stories and held one another up a bit, as people do.

That is all I wanted from becoming a historian: to be able to listen to voices like theirs, and the more of them the better, a gentle murmur rising all around us, like some great tenderness in the dark.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photograph, we see a long line of fishing nets drying in the sun on Harkers Island, N.C., in the fall of 1944.

It is hard to see them, but there are two men talking in the midst of the net reels.

The photographer’s notes only identify one of the men: Stacy W. Davis, a local fisherman, charter boat captain, and fish dealer. That’s his fish house and dock on the far side of the net reels and fishing nets.

Capt. Stacy had built the fish house just before the war. He and his brother Leslie also owned the S.W. Davis & Brother Seafood Co. in Beaufort, on the other side of the North River.

The shoreline is beautiful, but in a way the tranquility of the scene belies the great upheaval that was happening on the island just before and during the Second World War.

When I was younger, old timers from Harkers Island often told me that it all seemed to start with the great hurricane of ’33, which is a story in itself and one that I think I’ll save for another time.

But not all storms come out of the Atlantic, and what happened over the next few years turned island life upside down more than any hurricane or nor’easter ever had.

Just a few years after the ’33 storm, in 1936, Harkers Island’s first road was paved. The age of automobiles and trucks was coming.

Three years later, in 1939, electricity arrived on the island, delivered via a submarine cable that ran beneath North River.

The stars would never be as bright again.

A year later, in the latter part of 1940, the biggest thing of all happened: workers finished building the first bridge from the mainland to Harkers Island. The bridge opened to the public a few weeks later.

That was on New Years Day 1941. Many a time, I have heard old timers say that it was the best and worst day in the island’s history. More than anything, it marked the end of one way of life, the dawn of another.

Then, of course, the war came. Young men and women went away to fight in distant lands and on distant seas. On the island, families crowded around radios to follow the news from places that few of us had known existed until that moment. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere.

An Army camp was built on the island. Soldiers and sailors seemed to be constantly coming and going.

During the war, untold numbers of islanders also crossed the new bridge and went out into the larger world to take jobs at shipyards, military bases, and defense factories. Some commuted every morning to defense jobs as close as the Naval Section Base in Morehead City; others moved as far away as the big shipyards in Wilmington and Newport News.

The Great Depression had worn people down, but suddenly there seemed to be work for any and all.

A hundred things about the war changed the island, but few things more than the War Department building the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station only 25 miles away in 1942.

Nearly 10,000 men came together at at a remote crossroads on the south side of the Neuse River to build Cherry Point – carpenters, brick masons, ditch diggers, logging crews, railroad builders, and many, many others. Among other things, they laid enough concrete to build what is believed to have been the largest aircraft runway in the world at that time.

Most of those workers were fresh off the farm or right off a fishing boat.

When Cherry Point was finished, people came from all over the country to work there, and most particularly to find jobs at the base’s assembly and repair department, a massive aircraft repair and refitting operation that relied on civilian workers and was usually just called “A&R.”

Those workers included many a Harkers Island fisherman. And when they left their boats and crossed the new bridge, they began a new life in more ways than they possibly could have imagined at the time.

Some of those islanders, my older friends on Harkers Island used to tell me, were saved by that trip to Cherry Point. Others lost.

For the island’s women, the coming of Cherry Point meant, if anything, even more. Because so many men had gone to war, the base employed thousands of women in jobs that would have traditionally fallen to men.

Those jobs ranged from aircraft painters to mechanics, PX and commissary managers to electronics specialists.

My grandmother was one of those women. She lived on a farm in Harlowe, about halfway between Harkers Island and Cherry Point, and she found a job in A&R’s machine shop during the war.

With the opening of Cherry Point, a daughter fresh out of school, perhaps still living with her parents, might suddenly be earning more than her fisherman father and all her brothers put together.

Of course, that changed things. Maybe not right away, but over time.

Likewise, with the coming of the bridge and the war, a lad that had never taken to the water — and there were plenty of young men like that even on Harkers Island — suddenly had a chance for a different kind of life.

I guess what I am saying is that photographs tell some stories, but not others.

Our tranquil scene of fishing nets drying in the sunshine also does not really speak to what had been happening out at sea during the war.

By 1944, things had calmed down out in the Atlantic, but only a couple years earlier, in the first months after Pearl Harbor, the war had seemed much closer to Harkers Island that it did to most of the United States.

Many of the island’s young fishermen had gone into the Navy and Coast Guard, and they were serving all over the world. But the U.S. Navy had also recruited the island’s fishermen for war duty closer to home.

As German submarines torpedoed merchant ships out in the Atlantic, one of the islanders patrolled the beaches out at Shackleford Banks, watching in the surf for the corpses.

Others, when they heard the explosions offshore, had the duty of taking their boats far out into the Atlantic to search for survivors and the dead.

Out in those seas, 15 and 20 miles off Cape Lookout, they often found themselves in a hellish seascape of charred hulls, burning oil slicks and scenes of which few of them would ever speak.

Special thanks as always to my friends at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photo-essay in my “Working Lives” series, I am looking at several photographs that feature workers on a railroad that old timers, when I was a boy, still called the “Old Mullet Road.”

The real name of the railroad was the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad (A&NC). First in business in 1858, it ran from the coastal port of Morehead City, west to New Bern, Kinston, and finally Goldsboro.

Owned by the state of North Carolina, the railroad was usually leased to private operators and it played a vital role in opening the economy and communities of the North Carolina coast to the outside world.

In Goldsboro, at the railroad’s western end, other lines connected the A&NC’s passengers and freight to Raleigh and to distant markets and cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.

Local people referred to the A&NC as the “Old Mullet Road” because of the seemingly endless barrels of salt mullet that its freight cars carried out of Morehead City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With the opening of the railroad in 1858, the local fishery for striped mullet — what we’ve always called “jumping mullet” — grew into the largest saltwater fishery anywhere in the American South.

Long a staple in local pantries, barrels of salt mullet were soon as common in the country stores of eastern North Carolina as pickled pigs feet and rounds of farmers cheese.

-2-

The construction of the A&NC and the building of the coastal town of Morehead City went hand in hand.

The town’s resort trade, its famous charter fishing business, the state port, the local menhaden industry (one of the largest fisheries in the U.S.), and really the region’s entire wholesale seafood industry — none would have been imaginable without the “Old Mullet Road.”

The same could be said for the truck farming business throughout that whole central part of North Carolina’s coastal plain.

Over the years, the A&NC’s trains became part of daily life in the towns and crossroads through which it passed.

For people who lived along the tracks, the coming and going of the train, its whistle, and the sense of curiosity and wonder about what lost soul might be coming home, or what trouble might be arriving, became measures of time passing as much as the tides and the changing of the seasons.

-3-

Taken in Morehead City or New Bern in 1942, this photograph introduces us to one of the railroad’s employees who was something of a legend in that part of eastern North Carolina.

His name was J. B. Davis, people called him “Captain Davis,” and he was a conductor on the railroad for close to half a century.

On Nov. 30, 1924, the Raleigh News & Observer referred to Capt. Davis and the railroad’s three other conductors as “the most popular quartet in this part of the State….”

The paper went on to say, “They know more people than all the politicians in Wayne, Lenoir, Craven, and Carteret counties.”

A railroad conductor saw the best and worst of humanity. Capt. Davis came to know the high and mighty and the utterly defeated, those that were good, and those that were set on evil, people anxious to get back home, and those desperate to get away from home.

Along the railroad’s path, people often sought him out to get the latest news from other towns. Many a day, he was the first to bring word of births and marriages, shipwrecks, hurricanes and floods.

His own life on the railroad was far from uneventful: Capt. Davis was injured in a derailment in 1933, and he and the train’s brakeman were usually the first to reach the poor souls who were killed on the railroad tracks.

In 1939, when a new company, the Atlantic & East Carolina Railroad Co., took over the railroad’s lease, Capt. Davis was fired for allegedly not collecting fares from some of his passengers.

His discharge made headlines across eastern North Carolina, and he was eventually rehired, but there has to be story there.

Maybe he was just looking out for his friends. On the other hand, times were hard in the 1930s and I like to think that maybe now and then he looked the other way and let a penniless soul or two ride for free.

-4-

I assume that this gentleman was one of the train’s firemen, whose job it was to maintain the fire in the engine’s boiler by shoveling coal and watching the boiler’s water levels as well.

A 1947 newspaper article concerning a derailment mentions an A&NC fireman named Henry Peterson. This may be him, but I cannot be sure.

Judging from the way he holds himself, I might have thought that he was the train’s engineer, but that was not possible in eastern North Carolina in the first half of the 20th century because he was African American.

At the turn of the 20th century, the A&NC’s president was a New Bern banker and real estate mogul named James A. Bryan.

Bryan was one of the leaders of the white supremacy movement that swept North Carolina in the period from 1898 to 1900. To attract New Bern’s white working class men to the white supremacy cause, he promised to discharge all of the railroad’s black employees and give their jobs to white workers.

After the Wilmington Massacre and the victory of the white supremacists in November 1898, Bryan lived up to his promise.

According to documents preserved in the Bryan Family Papers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, he discharged dozens of A&NC conductors, porters, brakemen, mechanics, blacksmiths, and other skilled railroad men in 1899 and 1900.

He also fired many of the company’s lowest level black employees, including the night watchman at the company’s rail yard.

In exchange for white workingmen’s support for a state constitutional amendment that took all voting rights from the state’s black citizens, Bryan also pledged to embed white supremacy in the railroad’s labor policies into the future.

In practice, that meant: the A&NC’s managers would hire and promote whites preferentially, regardless of qualifications or experience; would never pay a black worker as much as a white worker; would never employ a black individual in a management role; and would never hire or promote a black man or woman into a job–such as locomotive engineer– that gave them supervisory responsibilities over any white employee.

The railroad’s policies with respect to race were still in place in 1942.

You can learn more about James A. Bryan’s leadership in New Bern’s white supremacy campaign, and see some of the manuscripts related to his firing of the A&NC’s black workers, in my essay, “The Other Coup D’Etat: Remembering New Bern in 1898.”

-5-

Only a few years before these photographs were taken, the railroad had seemed on its last legs.

The private railroad company that had leased the track from the State of North Carolina since 1904, the Norfolk & Southern, had defaulted in 1934, a victim of the Great Depression.

After the Norfolk & Southern’s default, state coffers could not keep up with the railroad’s maintenance and repair needs. Years of neglect began taking their toll: broken railroad ties abounded, embankments needed reinforcement, and much about the old railroad seemed frayed and worn out. Reports of derailments grew more common.

Things began to look up in 1939 however, when the state finally found a new private company to take over the railroad’s lease.

The new company, the Atlantic & Eastern North Carolina, invested in new engines and track repairs, updated at least some depots, and even repainted the cars a perky “Spanish blue” instead of the old dull black.

-6-

Then the war came. Everybody was on the move. Soldiers, sailors, defense workers, and civilians of all kinds.

A new prosperity was in the air, heightening the demand for carrying passengers and hauling the region’s agricultural products and other freight.

Probably most importantly, the federal government began constructing two massive new military installations on the central part of the North Carolina coast in 1941 and ’42. To build the two bases, the railroad’s freight cars would carry enough lumber, brick, piping, and other construction materials to build two good-sized cities from scratch.

The railroad ran a short spur from Havelock Station into the construction site for the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station (originally called Cunningham Field). To the south, the railroad carried construction materials to Camp Lejeune via a track that ran from New Bern to Jacksonville, then along a short spur owned and operated by the Navy.

By the time these photographs were taken, the railroad was making a profit again for the first time in recent memory.

-7-

The war changed the railroad and the North Carolina coast in a thousand ways, some easy to get used to, and some that probably haunted the workers that we have met here — Capt. Davis, the fireman, the mail clerk, the brakeman, and the porter in the photograph above — for their rest of their lives.

More than 25 years ago, I interviewed an elderly woman named Gretchen Brinson in Morehead City.

During the early part of World War II, Ms. Brinson had been a nurse in the burn unit of the town’s little hospital when German U-boats were sinking merchant vessels off that part of the North Carolina coast.

This is an excerpt from that interview:

“I married Bull Brinson in 1937. While my daughter was still an infant, I started working at the hospital. Very shortly, we began hearing depth charges and if they had a strike we could see the fires, the ships burning.

“The debris washed up on the ocean front, and there were several years we couldn’t swim up there because of the debris and the oil slicks.

“We could see the ships burning.

“When there was a strike out there at night, we knew this had happened and that next morning there would be casualties come in. Bodies, corpses did wash in on the beach. And they were brought into the hospital: burns, all manner of traumatic situations. The hospital was full. It was only a 30-bed hospital. They lay in the hall on cots. We were not prepared for the onslaught.”

She continued:

“Many of the young men who came here, son, did not live. When the 3 o’clock train left town, the baggage car doors were most always open, and you could see several coffins in their wooden boxes, being shipped to other places. There was seldom a day for months, maybe a year or more, when there were not one or two or three or possibly more that went out on that 3 o’clock train.”

-End-

My story “Gretchen Brinson: A Born Nurse” originally appeared in my “Listening to History” series in the Raleigh News & Observer on June 14, 1998. You can find a copy of the story here. 

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

This is a photograph of Ms. Neva Adams at work in the stitching room at the Morehead City Garment Co. in Morehead City, 1942.

Chartered in the fall of 1938, the “Shirt Factory” was first located on the second floor of a brick building a block from Bogue Sound. At the time, the Great Depression still lingered. Hoping to attract a textile company, the town’s leaders had invested in the space, the machinery, and a training program for workers.

By the time of this photograph, the company, which was started by a couple from Pennsylvania, had moved to a new building across the railroad tracks. The original building was later home to the Webb Memorial Library in downtown Morehead City.

In a way, the company’s arrival in town was an historic event. The work was hard, the hours long and, in its early years, workers were rather scandalously not even paid the legal minimum wage.

Nonetheless, a job at the Shirt Factory offered a singular opportunity for hundreds of women just before, during, and after World War II. For many, it was their first chance to do what used to be called “public work,” a catch-all phrase for any job not in the home or on the farm.

They came from near and far to the Shirt Factory. Scores of women commuted in the back of farm trucks.

Others walked from the Promise Land, the neighborhood of largely fishing families that bordered the Shirt Factory.

Some women even caught rides on the school bus from Salter Path, a fishing village all the way out on Bogue Banks.

Neva Adams, in this photo, resided in Morehead City, probably in the Promise Land. She was already a grandmother when she started working at the Shirt Factory, but she had lost her husband just before the war and was on her own.

For women like her, the Shirt Factory often seemed a godsend. To a large part, that was because of the income, of course.

But over the years, when I have been talking to women who worked at the Shirt Factory back in those days, they have often told me how much it meant to them to be part of a community of women who laughed a lot, shared stories, and supported one another.

Being with those women, they would say, was a balm for grief and loneliness and all the hurts that happen in life.

–2–

This is Ella Pittman, another of the Morehead City Garment Co.’s machine operators, at work in the stitching room in 1942.

Ms. Pittman was just the kind of woman that went to work at the Shirt Factory during the Second World War.

Born on Cedar Island in 1894, she had grown up in that remotest corner of the North Carolina coast long before bridges connected the local villages to the mainland.

Her father, Francis Marion Goodwin, was a fisherman all his life. A passel of Ms. Ella’s brothers, nephews, and cousins worked on the water as well– many of them on menhaden fishing boats.

Old timers still remember her brother, Capt. Leroy Goodwin, who was killed when a tugboat collided with his menhaden boat, the Barnegat, in 1960.

By the time that Ms. Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she had come a long way in her life.

As a girl and young woman on Cedar Island, she had cooked on a wood stove or over a hearth. She had done laundry in a tin wash pot, salted barrels of fish every autumn, and had been unacquainted with electricity and indoor plumbing.

In all likelihood, she grew up helping her mother in a garden resplendent in collard greens, shallots, and sweet potatoes.

She was quite likely already well acquainted with needle and twine before coming to the Shirt Factory. Many a Cedar Island home had two hooks in the family’s kitchen walls, like the ones you might hang a hammock from, but they were put there for stitching fishing nets.

That way the women in the family could work on the family’s fishing nets In between their kitchen chores.

As a young woman, Ms. Ella married Luther Pittman, a Cedar Island fisherman. Like so many other Down East families in that day, they soon left their island home and moved into Beaufort.

When young Ella and Luther moved into town, they settled in Lennoxville, a community largely of fishing families that was actually a few miles east of Beaufort’s town limits.

Many years later, when Ella Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she was probably in her 50s.

She was a mother of four, and she was likely the first woman in her extended family to do “public work” unless one of her daughters or nieces had gotten a wartime job at the Naval Section Base in Morehead City or at the big Marine Corps installation that was being built near Havelock.

The hours and working conditions at the Shirt Factory would seem grueling to many of us today.

However — and while I hate to make broad generalizations, I’m going to do it here anyway — a woman that grew up on Cedar Island in the early 1900s was used to hard work and long hours.

Even so, combining a daily shift at the Shirt Factory with a housewife’s duties could not have been easy.

Working at the Shirt Factory also posed challenges for many of those women that we might not consider today.

When I was younger, for instance, I often spoke with local women, including some of the women in my own family, who had gone from a fishing or farm life to a job at a factory or other public work during World War II.

For some, and especially older women workers, it took some getting used to, and some never did get used to it and did not last long.

Though accustomed to hard work, many said that it was a whole other thing to work by the clock, to be indoors all day, to do repetitive tasks day after day, and to have a boss with the power to tell them what to do, when to do it, when they could take breaks, and all the rest.

By all accounts, the Shirt Factory had a somewhat tumultuous first year.

Convicted on 25 counts of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, including a failure to pay the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, the company closed temporarily in May 1939. I am not sure how long the factory was idle, but the closure left more than 300 workers without a paycheck for a time.

Later in the 1940s, the company was also the scene of a bitter union drive.

During the union drive, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company’s owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing pro-union activists and intimidating workers prior to the union election. A copy of the ruling is online.

-3-

During the Second World War, a considerable part of the company’s production was for the United States Government, including in 1941, a $25,000 contract for military-issue khaki shirts, according to a March 15, 1914, report in the Asheville Times.

-4-

Here we get a more expansive view of the women in the company’s stitching room.

In my younger days, I had several elderly cousins and a great-uncle who had retired from long careers at the Shirt Factory.

I remember that when my cousins, all women, reminisced about their days at the Shirt Factory, they talked mainly about their friends there. They spoke of the feeling of sisterhood at the plant.

Long after they retired, they remained close to those women.

I did not get as much chance to be around my great-uncle Leo Simpson, and I don’t remember him speaking of the Shirt Factory, though he must have. He was married to my grandmother’s sister, Hilda.

However, I know that Great-Uncle Leo began working at the Shirt Factory in the late 1930s, soon after it first opened. For most of his career, he was the head of the factory’s cutting room.

My wonderful cousin Doug, one of Leo and Hilda’s sons, believes that his father likely met the company’s owners while he was helping to build the company’s new factory building in 1939 or ’40.

Doug was around the Shirt Factory from the time he was a small child. And when he got a little older, he had summer jobs there, before he went off and became a distinguished college professor and a leading authority on the great American educational philosopher John Dewey.

When I talked with Doug the other day, he recalled the company’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, as being “kind, gracious people.”

He told me that Mrs. Jackson worked alongside her husband at the factory. She was, he said, a tall, imposing woman who always dressed very nicely.

Cousin Doug was not around her husband as much, but he did remember Mr. Jackson’s fierce anti-unionism.

On the other hand, he also recalled Mr. Jackson’s support for racial integration and his commitment to employing African Americans throughout the Shirt Factory. Such a policy was very out of keeping with the region’s other textile plants, and it was apparently controversial in Morehead City when first implemented at the Shirt Factory.

Judging from these photographs, the Shirt Factory had not yet opened its stitching room’s doors to Black women in 1942.

-5-

In this last photograph from the Shirt Factory’s stitching room, we meet an 18-year-old machine operator named Annie Grace Benton, about whom I also did a bit of research on her background.

I discovered that, in a way, young Ms. Benton represented another kind of woman that was drawn to wartime jobs such as those at the Shirt Factory.

According to my research, she had grown up on a farm in Seven Springs, a rural hamlet 90 miles west of Morehead City.

She had evidently just left home for the first time.

For many young women such as her, a job at the Shirt Factory meant a chance to help their families. Many a time, their wages might even have helped keep their family’s farm afloat or enabled a younger brother or sister to go to college.

For many of the young women, the Shirt Factory and other public jobs were also an opportunity to put the Great Depression behind them and to free themselves from the provincialism of farm life, and most especially from the limited roles for women that had historically existed in the farming communities of eastern North Carolina.

Military boom towns such as Morehead City were particularly exciting during World War II. The town was bustling with a Naval section base that operated there, and Army patrols were in and out constantly.

A busy USO and other local businesses catered to servicemen and women on leave from the many military installations, army outposts, and airfields that were being built on that part of the North Carolina coast in the early part of the war.

The largest were the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, originally Cunningham Field, in Havelock and Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville.

Boardinghouses had sprung up all over Morehead City to cater to military wives and girlfriends, as well as to young farm women like Annie Grace Benton who were away from home for the first time.

Wherever Ms. Benton lived in Morehead City, probably in a boardinghouse, she was also around legions of other young women who had moved from other parts of the country to fill jobs at Cherry Point.

Those women were no ordinary lot either. At Cherry Point, they ranged from aircraft painters to flight instructors, jobs for which women, because so many men were overseas, were welcome for the first time.

Not only did many farm women, including, presumably Ms. Benton, welcome the financial independence offered by that kind of “public work,” but many also relished the liberty of being someplace where everyone did not know them, and the excitement of being liberated, however briefly, from the old mores — economic, social, and sexual — that governed women’s lives back home.

-End-

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. More of the series can be found on his website.

Like all the photographs in this “Working Lives” series, these next few photographs are also from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives.

However, this set of photographs is more personal for me than most of the other photographs that I have featured here: they were taken at my great-uncle George Ball and his brother Raymond Ball’s potato farm in Harlowe.

Uncle George, as my mother called him, was married to my grandfather’s sister Lizette. Their farm was on one side of the Harlowe Canal, while my grandfather and grandmother’s farm was on the other.

These photographs were taken in November 1942. In this first one, Mr. Raymond is standing on the left in front of a wall of bushel baskets. This is evidently the farm’s curing barn and the baskets are full of sweet potatoes.

According to the photographer’s notes, the other individual is J.Y. Lassiter, who I believe was a county farm agent.

-2-

Here we see two young African American men harvesting sweet potatoes at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

Old timers have told me that 300 to 350 men, women, and children worked for the Ball brothers at harvest time back in those days.

Most were local people, the large majority of them African American families that resided on the west side of Clubfoot Creek.

The Balls sometimes hired migrant laborers from Florida as well. When I was young, you could still see the ruins of the barracks where they stayed.

During the war, when these photographs were taken, Great-Uncle George and his brother also employed German prisoners of war.

My mother sometimes worked in the farm’s packing shed when she was a girl. She often told me about working alongside the young German men.

Harvesting sweet potatoes was no easy thing, and I have met farm people that would rather do just about anything else.

-3-

The Ball brothers were what in those days were called “progressive farmers.”

According to an article that was published in Carolina Co-operator magazine in August 1939, the Balls first invested in a tractor, an International Harvester Titan 10-20, in 1919.

In a family reminiscence, I learned that the tractor had a top speed of 3.5 miles per hour and made so much noise that locals looked at the “IHC” painted on the front, for International Harvester Co., and said it stood for “In Hell Continuously.”

The Balls were evidently the first farmers in Carteret County to own a tractor.

They were also at the forefront of other local innovations in farming that were transforming agriculture in the first half of the 20th century.

According to the Carolina Co-operator, they were among the county’s first farmers to use manufactured lime to fertilize reclaimed land, instead of burnt oyster shells and hardwood.

Similarly, they were among the first local farmers to build a modern irrigation system, to practice crop rotation, and to invest in farm machinery such as an oil burner for their curing barn and an automatic hay bailer.

By the time of this photograph, they had upgraded their tractor to a big 3-ton machine, but it is nowhere to be seen in these photographs. All we see in them are plow horses and field workers.

In the second photograph above, and in our next photograph, we see plowmen breaking up the ground, then other field hands, called diggers, following behind, often on their hands and knees.

They are digging the sweet potatoes out of the upturned ground by hand, cleaning them off, and placing them in bushel baskets.

-4-

This is another view of the sweet potato harvest at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

According to the article in Carolina Co-operator, the Ball brothers only grew three crops: white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cabbage.

After the harvest, the Balls cured their sweet potato crop for several months. Then, late in the winter and early in the spring, they trucked the crop to markets in Petersburg, Richmond, and Washington, D.C.

Some years ago, near the end of his life, I sat down with my great-uncle George’s son Billy Ball and talked about his family’s history on that land.

Cousin Billy told me that his father George Ball, his uncle Raymond, and two of their brothers had bought almost 350 acres there on the north side of the Harlowe Canal on credit in 1917.

It was an abandoned farm that had grown up in sweet gum and pine. Before that time, the Balls had been living in South River, a little to the east.

At that time, only 15 acres of the abandoned farm remained cleared. The Ball brothers built makeshift shelters for themselves and their mules, and they, and presumably a great many Black men from North Harlowe, began timbering, grubbing, and clearing the land.

The Balls didn’t make much money farming at first, but they sold the timber to make the payments on their bank loan.

George and Raymond’s two brothers eventually left the farm. Billy told me that it was too hard for them and they wanted a different kind of life.

Billy told me about the days when hundreds of people worked in the fields.  He recalled that his father and Mr. Raymond took trucks to North Harlowe to pick up the workers, then carried them home in the evening.

He remembered the men and women from North Harlowe bringing their lunches in lard pails, often just collard greens and corn dumplings.

-5-

In this photograph, we see my great-uncle George Ball paying one of his harvest workers in scrip.

According to the photographer’s notes, my great-uncle and his brother paid their field workers 5 cents a bushel.

I do not know how or when the field workers redeemed the scrip.  Perhaps they exchanged it for cash at the end of every workday or work week, or even after the harvest was completed.

Before the war, many of my family’s African American neighbors had few other options other than working in the fields.

By the end of 1942, when these photographs were taken, that was beginning to change largely because of the construction of the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station 11 miles to the west.

Thousands of civilians, of all races, found jobs at Cherry Point. To try to compete with the federal dollars, farm wages would have to go up, and many a white farmer that failed to treat his or her black workers with the respect or dignity to which they were entitled soon found themselves short on labor.

-End-

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

One of the more unusual scenes of working life that I found in the NCDC&D Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh was a series of photographs taken aboard the James Adams Floating Theatre while docked on the Pamlico River in Washington in 1940.

The James Adams Floating Theatre’s troupe of actors and actresses toured coastal waterways from Florida to New Jersey from 1914 to 1941. Tugboats towed the theater from town to town, and the boat’s troupe usually did a weeklong run before heading to their next stop.

Over the years, I have seen many photographs of the James Adams Floating Theatre. However, nearly all of them have been looking at the Floating Theatre and its traveling troupe of performers from a distance, usually when it was tied up at a wharf or being towed down a local waterway.

This group of photographs is different. Most were taken on the Floating Theatre, and they show the daily life of the boat’s performers and crew in a way that I have never seen before.

They show actors and actresses rehearsing a play. They take us into the boat’s galley and introduce us to the troupe’s cook. They give us a view into the ticket booth, and of one actress preparing her costume, another whiling away time between performances by fishing off the barge.

And, as we see in the photograph above, they give us a glimpse of stage manager and actor Daile Herlit doing his makeup just prior to a performance.

-3-

In this photograph, we see members of the boat’s troupe rehearsing a scene from a popular temperance play called “Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There.”

Based on a very popular 1854 novel by Timothy Shay Arthur, the play had been a staple on Vaudeville and in traveling shows for many a year.

The actress in this scene, Helen Brown, was one of the troupe’s stars.

Reflecting on the Floating Theatre’s heyday, Earl Dean of the Durham Morning Herald Oct. 1, 1950, recalled that the troupe’s staple fare was “the old blood-and-thunder melodrama with an atmosphere supercharged with dark and dirty deeds, tear jerkers with a pretty maiden, a mortgaged homestead and a villainous sheriff with a mortgage in his hip pocket.”

Plays like “Ten Nights in a Bar Room” were really just part of the offerings on the Floating Theatre though.

Musical performances, magic acts, ventriloquism, acrobatics, fortune telling, maybe a magic lantern show or even a pet act or two — there was no telling what you might see when the curtain went up!

-4-

Here we see a winsome pair of clowns all dressed up and ready to go on stage.

In the reminiscence that he published in the Durham Morning Herald, Dean described the Floating Theatre as “a great seagoing barn on a barge with a little house on top.”

The Floating Theatre, he recalled, carried a cast of a dozen or so, a seven-piece orchestra, and a cook or two, as well as the crews for the barge and the two tugboats that towed the barge from town to town.

Everyone did more than one job. Our clowns here might have served as ushers before the curtain went up, might have played a banjo and fiddle on stage between acts, and then helped with a play’s special effects when they were not on stage.

The boat’s theatre had room for about 400 persons when this photograph was taken in 1940.

-5-

Here we see the Floating Theatre’s captain taking tickets before a show.

-6-

And here we see one of the Floating Theatre’s actresses ironing a costume before that night’s show.

-7-

By 1940, times were catching up with the James Adams Floating Theatre. By then, at least in larger towns, the public could go to a movie theater and watch the latest Hollywood films.

More and more people also owned radios and record players. In many larger coastal towns, you could walk through the streets and hear all kinds of music coming out of people’s windows — Big Band music, jazz, opera and the latest dance numbers from New York City.

Many people also religiously followed their favorite radio dramas, comedy shows, and soap operas, at the time as well.

Perhaps by 1940, some of the novelty of the Floating Theatre was wearing off. It was getting easy to forget the thrill and excitement that the arrival of the James Adams Floating Theatre had given audiences in its early days, especially back in the 1910s and ’20s.

Built in 1913, the Floating Theatre was built in 1913 and had first begun traveling coastal waterways in 1914.

Over the years, as I have done historical research on other subjects, I have often been surprised at the places where I found the Floating Theatre’s troupe of players performing on the North Carolina coast.

The Floating Theatre’s players regularly staged shows in the state’s larger seaports, such as Washington, New Bern, and Elizabeth City. But the troupe also visited little coastal villages such as Winton, Murfreesboro, Bath, Bayboro, Oriental, Swansboro, and many others.

I even stumbled on the Floating Theatre hosting shows at a very remote lumber mill village on Juniper Bay, 10 or 12 miles east of Swan Quarter. The mill village was so small that it vanished when the mill eventually shut down.

In those sorts of places, even in 1940, theaters were few and far between, radios were uncommon, and most weren’t even on the old medicine show and traveling circus circuit.

When the Floating Theatre tied up at a wharf in a place like Juniper Bay, people came from far and wide to its shows.

They’d drive all day in a horse and cart or crowded into a farm wagon. They put down their saws and tromp out of the log woods. They’d close the schoolhouse’s doors and declare a holiday, all for the chance to see a show and laugh, forget their troubles, and feel things deeply.

As best I can tell, the Floating Theatre’s troupe welcomed one and all to their shows, as long as they could buy a ticket. To abide by the Jim Crow code of the time though, the ushers had no choice but to segregate white customers from those who were African American or Native American.

That was the law of the land and there were no exceptions, at least not in the light of day.

As the old saying went, “after midnight there was no black or white,” and truer words were never spoken.

-8-

In this last photograph in this series, we meet Rose Teal, the James Adams Floating Theatre’s cook.

Teal was evidently the kind of person who believed in preparing for the worst.

A year or two earlier, the Floating Theatre had hit a snag and sunk on the Roanoke River. I believe that the accident occurred while being towed from Murfreesboro to Williamston.

At the time, a newspaper reporter wrote, “Best prepared of the passengers was Rose, the cook, who has been with the show boat for the past six years. Rose, on the weekend trips from place to place, not only sleeps fully clothed and shod, but has all her belongings neatly done up in cardboard boxes.”

The reporter continued: “Her cabin was down under the stage, but she was among the first to reach the top-side, though how she and her collections negotiated the narrow stairway, was inexplicable.”

Nobody was hurt when the Floating Theatre went down. The boat was soon refloated and, as they say, the show went on.

Nevertheless, I can understand Rose Teal’s caution. That incident was at least the third time that the James Adams Floating Theatre had gone down.

Note from the author: This is the second photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here or here.

In this second group of photos, the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection photographers introduce us to workers in a sawmill, a handle mill, and a veneer plant that were located on the banks of the Roanoke River in 1938 and 1939.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, wood mills seemed to be up every river and creek on the North Carolina coast turning out lumber, shingles, veneer paneling, and, as we’ll see, even ax handles.

At the industry’s zenith around 1900, tens of thousands of men worked in those mills.

Millions of acres of forest were cut. Thousands of miles of railroad track were built to carry logs to mills and lumber to distant markets. Towns rose, and often fell, with the opening and closing of mills.

I was drawn to this photograph, and to the others below, because they give us a rare glimpse at the people inside those mills.

In this first photograph, we see two young men and an older gentleman cutting and stacking veneer panels at the Weitz Veneer Co.’s plant in Plymouth in 1938.

Based in Chicago, Weitz had made veneer paneling in Plymouth since the turn of the century.

The work was hard, exacting, and much of it required great skill. It was also notoriously dangerous. The rate of accidents was especially high in the furnace and boiler rooms and for those, like the men in this photograph, who operated lathes, planers, and other cutting machines.

At Weitz, the making of veneer began by sorting, debarking, and cutting raw logs into boards.

The company’s workers then used rotary lathes and slicing machines to cut the boards into thin sheets of veneer. Once that was done, they dried the veneer in kilns, then cut and fashioned the panels into whatever size and shape that was appropriate for the final product.

From there, the workers handed the veneer panels over to the finishing department, where other workers sanded and often stained or coated them in some way before other workers assembled them.

According to newspaper reports, the Weitz plant’s workers were largely using the veneer to manufacture wooden boxes when this photograph was taken in the late 1930s.

-2-

In this photograph, also from 1938, we see the Weitz Veneer Co.’s plant from the outside, a lone man strolling by.

The Roanoke River and the company’s wharf is on the other side of the plant. Down the road, but not visible in this photograph, was a section of company housing called White City.

Plymouth was booming in those years just before World War II. Large numbers of people were migrating to the little river town to work in the lumber and wood products industry.

Some came to Plymouth to work at Weitz or one of the town’s smaller wood products companies. Most, however, were looking for work at a massive new pulp mill that had opened in Plymouth in 1937.

A division of a large corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the North Carolina Pulp Co. had built the pulp mill on the banks of the Roanoke, 3 or 4 miles upriver of the Weitz plant.

Some of the town’s new residents came to Plymouth from towns where other mills had closed. A sizable contingent of workers from a shuttered mill in West Virginia, for instance, moved to Plymouth to take jobs at the pulp mill.

But hundreds of others were African American families that had forsaken sharecropping or tenant farming elsewhere in eastern North Carolina to make a new start at Weitz, the pulp mill, or one of the town’s other companies that were connected to the lumber industry.

At Weitz, the work was sweltering hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, ill paid, and as I mentioned earlier, often dangerous.

Nonetheless, from all I have heard, the company’s workers still considered a job at Weitz a big step up from sharecropping or tenant farming, which no doubt says a lot about what farming was like in that day, at least if you were African American and landless.

-3-

This is a photograph of a pair of the Weitz Veneer Co.’s workers in one of the company’s cutting rooms in 1938.

-4-

This is photograph from another company on the Roanoke, a sawmill in Williamston 20 miles upriver of Plymouth, in 1938. I am not sure, but I believe it is the sawmill at Saunders & Cox, a lumber company that had docks on the river a quarter mile east of the town’s U.S. 17 bridge.

If you look close, you will see at least four of the mill’s workers, and possibly a fifth back in the shadows.

The workers at Saunders & Cox received raw logs on the river and by truck. The logs could have been felled almost anywhere in the Roanoke River bottomland swamps or in the hinterlands– along the Cashie River or in the headwaters of the Pungo River, for instance.

Once the logs were sorted — “decking” in the trade — the sawyers went to work debarking and running the logs through the big saws. In most mills, they then ran the rough lumber through resaws or gang saws, capable of cutting multiple boards, that cut them into thinner boards.

The sawyers then used edging and trimming machines to shape the boards into four-sided lumber, after which the boards were ready for drying, which was sometimes done in kilns, sometimes in the open air.

-5-

This is another view of workers hoisting and debarking a log at the sawmill in Williamston, possibly Saunders & Cox, in 1938.

Judging from the company’s newspaper ads, this was not the kind of mill that shipped lumber far and wide. During the Great Depression, national demand for lumber plummeted and Saunders & Cox’s ads focused on local markets, mainly offering firewood and lumber for local building.

-6-

This is a our Williamston sawmill again, possibly Saunders & Cox, in August of 1938. A man leading a mule and cart through a lumber yard, or a field, was still a common sight in those last years before the Second World War, but that would not be true much longer.

Even in the 1920s and ’30s, mules, work horses, and oxen were everywhere. They pulled plows, hauled in fishing nets, dragged logs out of forests, and hauled wagons and carts laden with all manner of things.

But by the time that I was growing up in eastern North Carolina in the 1960s that had all changed.

I do not remember ever seeing a mule or any other work animal at a mill or factory.

At my grandmother’s little farm, we only knew one neighbor who still farmed with a mule in those days. He was a very endearing man, and very set in his ways, and so was his mule.

-7-

This photograph takes us back downriver to another wood products company that was located on the Roanoke River in 1938: the American Handle Co.’s factory in Plymouth.

The company was a division of the National Hoe Co., which was based in Cleveland, Ohio.

The National Hoe Co., in turn, was a subsidiary of the American Fork and Hoe Co., a sprawling near monopoly that had its roots in Vermont in the early 19th century.

At plants across the eastern U.S., the company’s workers made wooden handles for an astonishing array of farm, factory, and garden tools and equipment; purportedly more than a hundred types of shovel handles alone.

At the Plymouth plant, the company’s workers fashioned wooden handles for axes, hoes and other farm implements. I have often heard local people refer to the plant as the “ax factory.”

By most accounts, the workers made all of the handles out of white ash, which the company obtained from extensive forest holdings in Bertie, Washington, Martin and Halifax counties.

During and just after the Second World War,  the company’s workers were part of a wave of union organizing that sought to improve pay and working conditions for mill workers along that part of the Roanoke and throughout much of eastern North Carolina.

-8-

Finally, we see a train load of logs rolling down the branch of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad between Plymouth and Williamston, 1938.

-End-

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his official website.

Note from the author: This is the first photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here.

I want to begin this series by looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.

The oldest of the photographs was taken in 1937. Others were taken in 1938 and in the autumn of 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. One other was taken in 1942.

The first group of photographs focuses on the harvest workers, mostly the threshers, but also the diggers. A second group looks at the work of cleaning, grading and bagging the peanuts at a plant and warehouse in Edenton.

An ancient crop native to South America, peanuts spread across much of the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmers in West Africa were among those who came to grow them.

Most historians and ethnobotanists believe that peanuts came to North America, especially to Virginia and North Carolina, via West Africa and the slave trade in the 18th century. By most accounts, they were long considered a crop mainly for feeding hogs and for feeding the enslaved Africans that were forced to raise crops on the region’s plantations.

According to a 2019 article in the journal Peanut Science, southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina were especially important in the crop’s early development in North America in large part because of the slave trade.

In the southeastern part of the North Carolina coast, the Wilmington area was also an important center of peanut farming in the the 18th century. Again, wholly reliant on slave labor.

By 1860, the majority of the peanuts in the U.S. were grown on North Carolina’s coastal plain, though they were rarely grown as a commercial crop.

Little is known about how enslaved people utilized peanuts as a food, though it is assumed that some of the traditional peanut dishes of the Gullah Geechee peoples date to the slavery era. A good description of peanut farming’s early history in the Wilmington vicinity can be found at the website for Poplar Grove Plantation, a historic site built around what used to be a slave labor camp in Pender County.

A number of factors contributed to making peanuts into a successful commercial crop in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Those factors included the adoption of peanuts as an easy-to-carry, nonperishable, high protein food by Civil War soldiers; the groundbreaking research that George Washington Carver did on new food uses for peanuts at Tuskegee Institute; and the collapse of cotton prices and the rise of the boll weevil in the 1920s, which led many southern farmers to search for alternative crops.

Another important factor in the growth of peanuts and peanut farming was the development of popular new peanut products.

Modern peanut butter was invented sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, though there is some disagreement over where it was first made and who first invented it.

Another important development in the growing popularity of peanuts occurred in 1906, when two Italian immigrants, Amadeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, both innovators in the roast peanut trade, established a partnership that led to the creation of the Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., which is still famous for its “Mr. Peanut” logo and mascot today.

When Obici and Peruzzi located their first plant in Suffolk, Virginia, 50 miles north of Edenton, in 1913, they guaranteed an almost endless demand for peanuts in the northeast corner of North Carolina, and other peanut processing companies followed.

Peanut candies were also growing popular in those first decades of the 20th century. The peanut-laden Baby Ruth candy bar first appeared in 1923, the no less peanutty Mr. Goodbar in 1925, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 1928, Snickers in 1930, and Payday in 1932.

Cracker Jacks were a bit older — they were first developed in 1898 — but the popularity of Cracker Jacks and roasted peanuts soared with the popularity of baseball in the early 20th century.

All of which is to say, the demand for peanuts skyrocketed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout that time, the center of the peanut farming and peanut processing industry continued to be southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

When these photographs were taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the peanut belt in North Carolina ran from the counties on the north side of Albemarle Sound, including Chowan County, where Edenton is, west through Bertie, Martin, Northampton, and Halifax counties.

In those years, Enfield, a small town in Halifax County, was considered the state’s busiest peanut market.

In the photographs below, you will find something of a guide to this part of life and work in Eastern North Carolina’s history.

The photographs give us a glimpse at the people who worked in the peanut fields, and a look into a peanut mill in Edenton.

They introduce us to the kind of work that thousands upon thousands of mainly African American field workers did for much of the 20th century.

But as you will see, the stories behind the photographs also introduce us to people whom I never would have expected to meet in the peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina, including even Bahamian migrant laborers and Italian POWs from North Africa.

Note: I have arranged the photo-essays in my “Working Lives” series in chronological order to the extent possible. I’m beginning with these scenes from the peanut fields in Edenton because the earliest photograph among them is dated 1937. The last in the series will feature pickle factory workers in Faison and Mt. Olive in 1947.

So let’s get started with our first photograph, taken in the midst of threshing season on a peanut farm near Edenton.

-1-

In our first photograph, a broad view of threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton is spread out before us. We can see a field that seems to go on forever, threshers at work, several mules, piles of peanut hay, the dust rising up off a mechanical peanut picker, and a pile of burlap bags heavy with peanuts.

Threshing was hard work, but the hardest work had already been done some weeks earlier, when scores of field workers had dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground and set them out on stakes to cure.

Like beans and peas, peanuts are a legume, technically not a nut, but they are exceptional among the legumes because their pods develop beneath the ground.

To harvest the peanuts in this field, laborers, probably all of them African American, dug up the the whole plant: vine, pods and all. It was a grueling job accomplished with mules, plows, and a great deal of sweat.

After digging the vines out of the ground, the field workers shook the dirt loose from the plants before setting them out to cure. A task that, in my experience, is harder than it sounds and which nobody remembers fondly.

In a field this size, hundreds of field laborers would likely have done the digging, shaking and staking.

Firsthand accounts of peanut field workers’ labors are rare, but on July 5, 1983, the Wilmington Star-News ran an interview with an African American woman who dug peanuts on a large farm around the time that these photographs were taken.

The interview featured Ms. Carrie Simmons Ballard, who was born at Poplar Grove in Pender County in 1905.

The reporter wrote:

“As a child, she ‘put in many hours picking peanuts on The Big Lot’ where her great-grandmother was the main house servant for the Foy family. Her grandmother and mother also worked for the family. ‘They grew some cotton too, but the main farm product was peanuts,’ she said.

“‘I never did much cotton picking, but I sure did my share in the peanut fields…..’”

Ms. Ballard went on to say, “The thing that stands out most in my mind was how hard we worked for so little. It seemed like we had to work so hard for just some food and barely something to wear.”

-2-

In this photograph, we see what is apparently the same Edenton peanut farm, but three years earlier. In the foreground, we get an especially good look at the “shocks” that were typical of peanut farming in that day.

As field workers dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground, they would place stakes in the ground and build up stacks of vines and pods around the stakes so that the pods could cure before threshing. Those mounds of peanut vines were called “shocks.”

Farmers typically left the shocks in the field and let the peanuts cure for five or six weeks before threshing began. To this day, some old-timers brook no doubt that peanuts cured in shocks are more flavorful than those cured in windrows, the more modern way.

-3-

This is another photograph of threshing time at the farm near Edenton.

In this case, we can see workers operating a mechanical thresher, usually called a picker, in the center of the photograph. However, I was really drawn to this photograph because it highlights the peanut shocks stretched out in the field behind the threshers.

A field full of peanut shocks was a sight to see, reflecting endless hours of toil. In the largest fields, such as this one, they always remind me of the scenes in “Anna Karenina” of threshing time in the Russian countryside.

-4-

After the peanuts had cured, farm workers pulled up the stakes and raked up the hay, as it was called, being careful to stay clear of the snakes and rats that were notoriously fond of them.

Horses or mules would then cart the hay to a stationary mechanical picker that operated in the field.

The 1940s was a moment in history when tractors and mules often worked side by side in Eastern North Carolina’s fields.

Even as late as 1940, only about 4% of the state’s farmers owned tractors. Even a large, comparatively prosperous farmer, as the owner of his field must have been, was unlikely to have more than the one tractor, which, as we will see, this farmer was using to power his mechanical picker.

The end of the Age of Mules was nigh, but it had not yet arrived on the eve of the Second World War.

-5-

Here we see workers unloading hay next to the mechanical picker in our peanut field outside Edenton.

On the right, we can see a pile of stakes that have already been stripped of their vines. On the left, a man is stitching up a burlap bag of peanuts that have just come out of the picker.

-6-

By the time this photograph was taken, at least larger peanut farmers were using pickers such as this one that were powered by long belts attached to the back axel of a farm truck or, in this case, a tractor.

Even a few years earlier, horses or mules would have done the job.

-7-

This photograph provides a closer look at the farm’s mechanical peanut picker, a machine that was designed to break up the hay, remove the peanuts from the vines, and shake out debris and dust. It was a technology that had just come into widespread use in the previous two decades.

An unschooled African American farmer and inventor named Benjamin Hicks, in Southampton County, Virginia, filed what is believed to be the first patent for a mechanical peanut picker in 1901.

By all accounts, Hicks cobbled his ingenious machine together with a blacksmith’s anvil, tool box, and carpenter’s tools.

At least two makers of farm equipment modeled their peanut pickers on Hicks’ design, one of them without his consent.

To learn more about that patent dispute and about Benjamin Hicks, see Anna Zeide’s recent article in the journal Agricultural History, “The Dignity of Invention: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900-1920.”

-8-

In this photograph, we see one of the many young field workers that labored in this farm’s fields during the peanut harvest.

The mechanical thresher separated out the peanuts, emptying them into galvanized tin tubs. This worker is carrying the nuts to other field hands who will bag them, stitch the bag shut, and load the bags onto a truck.

At that time, the average wage for agricultural workers on the East Coast of the U.S. was $1.20 a day.

As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had enacted important child labor reforms during the Great Depression. Those laws specifically exempted children who worked on farms.

By one estimate, half a million children were working in America’s fields in 1938.

-9-

In this photograph, we see another young field worker emptying a pail of peanuts into a burlap bag, while another, older man stitches a bag shut and makes it ready for shipment.

-10-

The farm workers next loaded the bags of peanuts onto a truck that would carry them into one of the two peanut processing plants in Edenton.

Note the sea of peanut shocks in the distance. They seem to go on forever.

On the upper left, we can see the dust rising up from the mechanical picker as it separates the vines and peanuts.

-11-

Once the peanuts had been separated, laborers carted away the peanut hay usually for use as livestock feed.

Farmers valued peanut hay as an especially good feed for hogs.

-12-

I am not exactly sure what is happening in this scene, but I suspect that we are looking at a small hay baler or a presser that flattened and compacted the vines after they passed through the picker. Farmers sometimes used such machines to  make it easier to store the hay for use as livestock fodder.

-13-

A large part of the peanuts harvested on that north side of the Albemarle Sound ended up here, at the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant in Edenton. Located on a bay that is on the north side of Albemarle Sound, Edenton is the county seat of Chowan County, and at that time had a population of just under 4,000 citizens.

At the time these photographs were taken, Edenton was home to two peanut processing plants, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co.

By 1935, according to the Greensboro News & Record on Aug. 16, 1935, the two companies were handling a total of some 25,000,000 pounds of peanuts a year.

The plant’s workers shelled, cleaned and bagged peanuts for farmers near Edenton and the rest of Chowan County, as well as peanuts harvested from farms in surrounding counties.

According to a number of accounts, you could tell when the plant was operating from some distance because a haze of smoke blanketed North Edenton when the plant was fueling its boilers with discarded peanut shells.

-14-

Here we see a great pile of peanuts waiting to be cleaned and graded at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

These workers are stacking freshly arrived, 100-pound bags of peanuts, still in the shell, in the company’s warehouse.

-15-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s hands lifting a bag of unshelled peanuts at the company’s warehouse.

He may be adding the bag to the stockpile or he may be taking the bag off the pile and loading it onto the handcart on the right so that he can carry it into the mill’s shelling and cleaning rooms.

-16-

This gentleman is emptying bags of peanuts so that they can be placed on conveyor belts for cleaning and grading.

Like many of the other photographs of peanut farming and peanut processing in the state-managed collection, this photograph was taken in 1941, quite likely just a few weeks or even days before Pearl Harbor.

Long before that time though, U.S. war planners had begun planning how to adjust the nation’s crop production to compensate for expected wartime disruptions in the agricultural supply chain.

They did so with an eye both toward meeting the country’s domestic food needs and toward fulfilling the country’s Lend-Lease Act agreements with Great Britain and other allied countries.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the war cut off 68% of the nation’s supply of imported vegetable oils within a year of this photograph.

That was an issue of concern to American consumers, but in some cases it was also a concern for the U.S. military.

Just to cite one example, the bulk of the palm oil used in the United States to produce nitroglycerine for military uses had come from the Philippines prior to the beginning of World War II.

However, that supply of palm oil was completely cut off when Japan occupied the the Philippines in May 1942.

Looking for substitutes for imported oils, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Monthly Review July 31, 1942, noted, “a widespread program was launched, calling for increases in production of lard, tallow, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, soy beans, and other fats and oils.”

The article goes on to say, “Farmers in the South. . .  are taking an important part in this program by expanding the production of peanuts.”

At the time this photograph was taken, military planners had just announced a federal program to expand the country’s peanut acreage by 83 percent, roughly half of which would be set aside for use as oil.

Later in the war, the government would push to raise the country’s peanuts acreage by another 50%, all of which left peanut farmers and the workers at the Albemarle Peanut Co. with little time to rest.

As part of the wartime effort to increase peanut production, the USDA even arranged to rent mechanical pickers and threshers to farmers at a low fee in order help them increase peanut acreage.

-17-

Here we see young women removing flawed or shriveled peanuts from a conveyor belt at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-18-

This is a view of some of the chain belts that powered the conveyors at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-19-

During the Great Depression, times were hard in Edenton, as they were throughout most of the North Carolina coast.

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the town’s citizens were on some kind of public relief. Unemployment rose above 25%. Few could afford doctors or medicines. In many homes, mothers and fathers struggled to keep food on the table. Many cut back, trying to get by on one meal a day.

Far too many grew far too acquainted with hunger and malnutrition.

Against that background, the success of the two local peanut plants — no matter how hard the work, no matter how poorly it paid — was one of the few bright spots in Edenton’s business scene.

In the words of the Raleigh News & Observer Jan. 19, 1933,  the two plants were “a great help to the destitute condition of many Edenton families.”

Between them, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co. employed some 150 to 200 workers in season and the peanut industry overall was one of the town’s largest employers.

In this photograph, one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers is sewing up burlap bags of peanuts to prepare them for shipment.

-20-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers carting bags of peanuts out to the plant’s loading dock.

Looking back now, the transformation of Eastern North Carolina’s economy that occurred in the scant few years between the earliest photograph in this group– during the Great Depression in 1937– and the last, on the eve of World War II, was almost breathtaking.

As the nation prepared for war, massive federal investments in the construction of military installations, defense industries, and shipyards especially on the North Carolina coast– and a tremendous infusion of federal dollars into supporting agriculture– proved to be a life-changing moment for countless families and for the future of the region.

During the Great Depression, incredibly high unemployment and the collapse of crop prices had been devastating for Eastern North Carolina.

That all changed during the war. By 1943, the War Department had actually declared the whole region to be a “labor shortage zone,” a designation that meant that the federal government should not target the area for other military projects out of concern that there might not be an adequate supply of civilian labor to build or support them.

Even as early as 1941, when many of these photographs were taken, a general shortage of rural labor was being felt throughout Eastern North Carolina, and the federal government’s push for increasing peanut acreage was one of many special challenges.

To address that wartime labor shortage– and regrettably, also to resist demands from African American workers to raise wages and improve working conditions– peanut farmers in northeastern North Carolina often turned to migrant farm workers and to German and Italian POWs.

In 1943, for example, the War Manpower Commission recommended that 1,500 POWs be sent to northeastern North Carolina for the peanut harvest. Five hundred Italian POWs were assigned just to the peanut harvest in Bertie, Hertford, and Martin counties.

That same year, a temporary camp for Italian POWS was erected at a baseball field in Tarboro, in Edgecombe County, just to supply labor for the local peanut harvest.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun indicated that the Italian POWs at the Tarboro camp were mainly from Sicily and from Italy’s colonies in North Africa – so they may have included men from what are now Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and/or Somalia.

The next year, 1944, state records indicated that POWs alone harvested a total of 9,141 acres of peanuts in Eastern North Carolina. Asheville Citizen Times, Feb. 22, 1945.

For most of the war, the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, also directed migrant laborers to the region’s peanut fields.

In the fall of 1943, the FSA even opened a special government-run migrant labor camp in Enfield, in Halifax County, to house 400-500 peanut harvest workers.

Even as late as the fall of 1945, after the war was over, state and federal manpower agencies diverted hundreds of Bahamian laborers to northeastern North Carolina’s peanut fields.

That year the short-lived Naval Air Station in Edenton also temporarily housed POWs. They were only there during the peanut harvest, then returned to a POW camp in Ahoskie. Salisbury Post, Sept. 4, 1945.

-21-

These may be bags of unshelled peanuts waiting to be carried into the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant or they may be bags of processed peanuts waiting to be trucked out or shipped out by railroad.

In that day, a large percentage of the South’s peanut crop as a whole was bound for oil mills and peanut butter factories. Some of the peanuts that came through the Albemarle Peanut Co. no doubt had the same destination.

That said, compared to peanut varieties grown elsewhere, there was an especially high demand for the “Virginia style” peanut variety that was most commonly grown in Tidewater Virginia and in northeastern North Carolina for use as “cocktail peanuts” and for roasting.

In those last days before the war, there was really no telling where these peanuts were bound. Some of them may even have ended up on foreign battlefields, either in the packs of American soldiers or those of soldiers from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or one of our other allies.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend a special thanks to the USDA’s James Davis III for helping me to interpret the scenes in these photographs. A third-generation peanut farmer in Palmyra, N.C., Mr. Davis was North Carolina’s “Small Farmer of the Year” in 2002 and is now a chief program officer at the USDA’s office in Raleigh.

Mr. Davis told me that some of his knowledge of peanut farming came from his farming days, some from his studies at N.C. A&T, and some from his long years as a county farm agent and director of the USDA’s office in Halifax County, N.C.

Above all, he told me, his most important teachers were his father and grandfather, the latter of whom grew up sharecropping in Edgecombe County, N.C., and ended up buying and operating his own farm in Palmyra just after the Second World War.

I am very grateful for his assistance, and I hope very much that I did justice to his lessons.

Thank you too to Professor Katherine Charron at N.C. State University and the Grant family in Tillery for introducing me to Mr. Davis.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Today I would like to introduce a series of photo-essays that I will be publishing here over the next few weeks. Each of the photo-essays — some very brief, some longer — will focus on the working lives of people in eastern North Carolina just before, during, and after the Second World War.

The longest of the photo-essays features 22 historical photographs. In the shortest ones, though, I will try to build a story around a much smaller group of photographs, and sometimes only a single picture.

In all cases, I have based my stories on photographs that are part of the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh.

Between 1937 and 1951, the department photographers created a collective portrait of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. Some of the photographs were used in state publications or shared with magazines and newspapers. The vast majority, though, have not appeared in print.

Few of the photographs have the kind of artistic qualities that we see in the classic tradition of American documentary photography. For example, in the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, photographs of life in America during the Great Depression.

Nonetheless, I find something extremely compelling about them. Perhaps above all, I am drawn to the way that the photographs take us into fields and factories that are rarely if ever included in the stories that we historians tell about the history of North Carolina.

They are not romanticized images of working people. They are more matter of fact, more hard nosed and grittier.

These are images from down by the railroad tracks. From the warehouse district. From the engine room.

From the fields. From the lumberyards. From the textile mills. In one case, even from an actor’s makeup room.

In many of them, you can feel how hot it was, or how cold, the strain of the long days, the dangers that the people in them stood up to, all for the sake of making a living and looking after their families.

In some, you can see the pride that the people in these photographs took in their toil and craftsmanship. In others, you look at the people’s faces and wonder how they kept going.

The photographs that I am featuring are only a very small portion of the historical photographs in the Department of Conservation and Development Collection.

I have chosen to sort them into nearly 20 photo-essays featuring a total of 100 photographs in all.

The photographs that I have chosen were all taken in eastern North Carolina, basically east of I-95 today. Some were taken quite close to where I grew up on the North Carolina coast, a few even look at a sweet potato harvest on my great-uncle’s farm in Carteret County.

Others take us into different fields and factories, mills and migrant camps, remote fishing camps and distant seas.

My choice of photographs may seem eclectic at times. But I picked each photograph, or group of photographs, because I thought that they offered a special window into some important aspect of the history of eastern North Carolina, and because I thought that they led us to interesting stories.

I hope you enjoy all of the photo-essays. I will begin the series sometime in the next few days with the longest, which focuses on photographs of threshers in peanut fields near Edenton, at the end of the Great Depression and in the days just before the Second World War.

Even in that very provincial sounding subject — threshers on a peanut farm — I think you may be surprised where the story leads.

As I worked my way through the photographs from that long ago peanut farm, I was introduced to a host of unexpected stories and working people. Just in those few handfuls of photographs, you will meet Bahamian migrant laborers, POWs from North Africa, a pioneering black inventor from Southampton County, Virginia, and Mr. Peanut, among others.

You may also learn, at least I hope you will, a surprising amount about peanuts, the history of peanut farming, the evolution of farm labor and farm machinery, and the national security crisis that led to the dramatic expansion of peanut farming during the Second World War.

To say nothing of plenty of fun facts about the invention of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Baby Ruths.

Above all, and all kidding aside, I hope that these stories will help you to look at these men and women, and sometimes mere children, with a sense of kinship, a feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Next in the series: “In the Peanut Fields of Edenton, 1937-41”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

One day I hope that I will know more about Betty Town, a free African American community that white raiders destroyed just before the Civil War to make way for the founding of Aurora.

Now and then, when I have had time, I have done a fair bit of historical research on the people of Betty Town, how their land was taken, and how the community’s people were driven out of their homes.

But there is still much that I do not know. Many of the historical sources are opaque, some of them are difficult to understand, and none tell us what happened from the point of view of the people who lived in Betty Town.

I wish that I had to time to work through those difficulties. But the truth is, my life has somehow gotten far busier than I ever thought it would be at this age: I fear that I will never find the time to do justice to Betty Town’s history.

For that reason, I want to share here what I know now about Betty Town. That way, if other people are interested, maybe they will pick up where I have left off and go further.

Perhaps, after reading this, a younger scholar or a precocious student will take it on, or maybe even a descendant of those who lost their land and homes.

For me the voices of the people of Betty Town are like the fading sounds of whispers in the night. I catch a few words here, and a few words there, but it is always better if more people are listening.

Together we can share what we hear and maybe, just maybe, the story of Betty Town will not be lost.

‘Where the bear, free negro and wild cat roamed’

So I will go first. Here is what I know about Betty Town, the free African American community that used to be on the North Carolina coast, only 30 miles from where I grew up:

First, Betty Town was a rural settlement of free African Americans located on South Creek, 22 miles southeast of the town of Washington, in Beaufort County.

The community was a remote refuge from the evils of the day. Writing in the Feb. 4, 1886, Goldsboro Messenger, one former visitor remembered Betty Town as a land “where the bear, free negro and wild cat roamed at their own free will.”

Another white commentator, also writing after the Civil War, gives us a hint that at least some whites saw Betty Town’s independence and self-reliance as somewhat menacing.

Published in Raleigh’s Weekly Observer on Aug. 10, 1877, that writer declared that Betty Town and its vicinity had been a shady place up until 1857 or 1858.

That part of Beaufort County, the writer declared, was “regarded as an almost worthless swamp except for shingles and staves; the ridges being inhabited for the most part by a thriftless set of free negroes and half-breed Indians.”

That is the way that the state’s white leaders, at least many of them, used to talk about the communities of free, mixed-race people that were located in many different parts of North Carolina’s coastal plain.

In general, they were people set apart and who guarded their freedom, since they knew all too well that it could be taken away if they were not watchful. Nearly all lived off the land — farming, fishing, working in the woods.

The site of Betty Town is now the location of Aurora, a small town that, as the saying goes, has seen better days.

Betty Town’s 18th-century origins

The origin of Betty Town dates at least to the late 18th century and to a free African American couple named Isaiah and Betty Hodge. (Betty Hodge was the community’s namesake.)

The first U.S. census was taken in 1790. At that time, the Hodge family was already residing on South Creek.

In that first federal census of 1790, a “Zear” Hodge, Isaiah or possibly Isaiah’s father, is listed as the head of a household that included four people of color and a white woman.

At that time, Isaiah Hodge would have been 15 years old. He was born in or about 1775.

The Hodges’ neighbors included a sizeable cluster of other free people of color. They included families with the last names of Blango, Johnston, Holmes and Keys, among others.

Exactly how long that group of free African Americans had been in that part of Beaufort County is not clear to me.

However, I did consult the work of master genealogist Paul Heinigg, one of the leading authorities on the history of free African Americans in Virginia and North Carolina.

Heinigg’s research indicates that several free Black families left southeastern Virginia and settled in what became Betty Town and neighboring parts of southeastern Beaufort County earlier in the 1700s.

They included Blangos, Driggers, Perkinses, Moores, and Johnsons (or Johnstons), at the very least.

 A free African American named Thomas Blango, for example, had settled in Beaufort County by 1701, and Blango family genealogists still trace the family’s roots in the county specifically to Betty Town.

Family Blango

According to Stanton Allen’s “Family Blango: A Study of Black American Genealogy,” three free African Americans families with the surname Blango resided at Betty Town in the early 1800s: those of John Blango, John Blango, Jr., and Mrs. Peggy Blango.

Stanton Allen’s article appeared in Bayboro-based The Pamlico News on Aug. 24, 1983.

By the 1810 census, Isaiah Hodge is listed as head of the Hodge household. Eleven others resided with him: 10 free Blacks and one individual who was enslaved, though apparently not by the Hodges.

Thirty years later, Isaiah Hodges is listed in the federal census as head of a household with 15 members, all free, and presumably including children and perhaps grandchildren, and maybe others, too.

(Census takers did not begin to enumerate individual names, other than heads of households, until 1850.)

By 1850, the last census before his death, Isaiah Hodge, then age 75, was listed as the head of a household that included his wife Elizabeth (Betty), three younger adults with the surname Hodge, and an enslaved mother and her five children.

Judging from the census, nine other households of free African Americans lived around them, presumably in what was considered “Betty Town.” They included families with the surnames of Tyson, Hagins, Perkins, Driggers, and maybe Simpsons.

(Judging by their listing in the census, the Simpsons may have resided in a nearby, but slightly different neighborhood).

When I reviewed the Beaufort County deeds at the State Archives, I failed to get a clear picture of Betty Town’s boundaries.

However, the deeds did indicate that Isaiah Hodge alone owned at least 300 acres on both sides of South Creek in the early part of the 19^th century.

Betty Town’s boundaries may have been confined to the Hodge family’s holdings. Or the Hodge lands may have been only the heart of a larger territory that local people called Betty Town.

If Betty Town was confined to the Hodge family holdings, I would suspect that other families also resided on their land and that most of them would have been at least distantly related to Isaiah and Betty Hodge.

Figuring out those relationships will require more genealogical research, but one thing is clear: On the eve of the Civil War, Betty Town was a small but significant enclave of free African Americans that had survived in that part of Beaufort County since the 18^th century.

The Free African Americans of South Creek

The free African Americans who lived in Betty Town were not alone. They were among a sizable minority of free African Americans who resided in that part of Beaufort County.

In the South Creek census district as a whole, free African Americans made up more than a quarter of the total free population in 1850.

According to the census, the South Creek district had a total population of 1,092 persons in 1850. That included 209 free Blacks, 294 enslaved people of color, and 589 free whites.

However, even if Betty Town and similar communities were refuges in some ways, that did not mean that they were safe.

The decade of the 1850s, as the people of Betty Town discovered, was an especially dangerous time to be a free African American in Beaufort County or anywhere on the North Carolina coast.

‘A Free Negro Named Isaiah Hodge’

According to census records, local deeds, and newspaper accounts, Betty Town had vanished by the beginning of the Civil War.

All historical sources that I have seen agree on the basic facts of what happened to Betty Town. First, they agree that one of Beaufort County’s wealthiest and most influential white political leaders claimed to have forcibly taken legal possession of the community’s land sometime in 1857 or 1858.

Even in white circles, it seems to have been acknowledged that the taking of Betty Town’s land was accomplished by legal chicanery.

Second, at least a significant part of Betty Town’s residents, including the Hodge family, refused to abandon their homes.

Third, the holdouts were eventually driven out of Betty Town not by lawful authorities, but by vigilantes.

That much seems clear. Many details do not seem clear to me at all, however. The historical accounts are relatively few, they clash in some cases, and large gaps in the story remain.

While I did not necessarily expect to find it, I was also disappointed not to find an account of Betty Town’s last days that was written by any of those who were dispossessed or their descendants.

To me that is an almost crippling omission. In my long years as a historian, I have repeatedly seen how contemporary white and Black views of historical events are often completely different. Again and again, I have found them to be as different as night and day.

All that said, even the surviving white accounts paint a sordid portrait of the destruction of Betty Town.

The most widely known account was written in 1916 by Robert Tripp Bonner, who was one of the most active local historians and genealogists in Beaufort County in the early 20^th century.

A surveyor by trade, R.T. Bonner (1854-1919), who was white, came from Bonnerton, only a few miles from Betty Town, and spent much of his life in Aurora.

At the time of Betty Town’s troubles, he was just a young boy, five or six years old. However, he inevitably grew up hearing stories about Betty Town.

Years later, in 1880, when the town of Aurora was officially incorporated at the former site of Betty Town, he was the surveyor who laid out the town’s streets.

In the early 20^th century, Bonner occasionally wrote articles on Beaufort County’s history in the local newspapers. One of those articles focused on the town of Aurora’s history.

Published in the Washington Progress in 1916, Bonner’s article was not hesitant about looking at Aurora’s origins:

“The land previous to the Civil War was owned by a free negro named Isaiah Hodge who died from the effects of a cancer and during his sickness was furnished with the necessities of life by Isaiah Respess who took a mortgage on the lands.”

Isaiah Respess was a prosperous merchant, farmer, and lumberman who had extensive land holdings across a broad swath of eastern North Carolina. He was also the mayor of Washington during the early part of the Civil War.

Bonner recalled that, after Isaiah Hodge’s death, which was apparently in 1857 or 1858, Respess called in the family’s debts and, when his widow Betty could not meet them, had their land confiscated.

He then “sold the land under execution by Sheriff Henry Alderson Ellison and bid it in about 1859.”

Sometime soon after, according to Bonner, “Rev. W. H. Cunningham, of Lenoir County, came to South Creek, bought the site of Aurora from Isaiah Respess and began the town.”  

The Rev. W. H. Cunningham (ca. 1824-1895) was a Methodist minister originally from Greene County. Before coming to Beaufort County, he had been serving as the principal of Lenoir Academy, a private school in Kinston, the seat of Lenoir County.

He had a highly entrepreneurial spirit and was involved in a number of real estate and business ventures before, during, and after the Civil War.

The Dispossessed

The Hodges and their neighbors obviously believed that the taking of their land was an injustice.

By all accounts, they did not accept the legality of the sheriff’s proceedings, the right of Respess to have their land confiscated, or Rev. Cunningham’s right to evict them. According to Bonner’s story, they defied Rev. Cunningham and the county sheriff and refused to leave their homes in Betty Town.

Bonner continued:

“Mr. Cunningham had much trouble dispossessing the free negroes, but one Sunday night, [when] these negroes left their homes to go to a big preaching, Cunningham tore down their houses and took possession of their lands.”

The county sheriff evidently allowed the assault, but that would not have surprised anyone, Black or white, at the time. In antebellum North Carolina, free African Americans were left to defend their own.

Betty Town is unlikely to have survived so long if the community had not previously shown that it was able to defend itself.

In his history of Aurora, Bonner then says:

“These negroes emigrated to Ohio and as the law at that time forbid free negroes after leaving the state to return, they and their descendants did not come back.”

The Legal Status of Free African Americans

In 1830, North Carolina legislators prohibited free African Americans from returning to the state if they left for 90 days.

That law was part of a raft of laws and state constitutional amendments in the 1830s that deprived free blacks of many of the most basic rights of American citizenship.

Other rights taken away from North Carolina’s free African Americans in the 1830s included the right of free assembly, the right of free speech, the right to vote, the right to bear arms, and the right to testify against white citizens in court.

Without those rights, Betty Town’s citizens realistically had no path to defending themselves against the takeover of their land, at least not in court, even in the unlikely event that they could have found a local attorney willing to represent them.

According to Bonner’s 1916 story, after taking Betty Town’s homes and farms, the Rev. Cunningham renamed the place “Aurora.”

Even before the Civil War, he began recruiting new settlers to the former site of Betty Town by running advertisements in newspapers in other parts of North Carolina that made “Aurora” sound like Eden.

From North Carolina to Ohio

Betty Town’s refugees were not the only free African Americans who looked to the state of Ohio for shelter in those last years before the Civil War.

Confronted with severe restrictions on their legal rights and by growing white violence, an important number of North Carolina’s free African Americans found new homes in the northern states.

In the 1850s, Cleveland, Oberlin, and other parts of Ohio were especially common destinations for free African Americans from Eastern North Carolina.

Probably the best known of the region’s free Black exiles in Ohio was Lewis Sheridan Leary.

Leary left his family’s home in Fayetteville, and moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1856. He was active in the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, probably active in the Underground Railroad, and was one of three Blacks who rode with John Brown at Harpers Ferry.

‘A Gang of Lawless Ruffians’

Another account of Betty Town’s last days was published just a short time after the community’s destruction.

Appearing in the North Carolina Times, a Raleigh newspaper, on Jan. 25, 1860, an anonymous letter writer calling himself “John Veritas” declared that he had visited “Aurora” that winter, while visiting friends in that part of Beaufort County.

In his letter, John Veritas indicated that he had read a newspaper advertisement placed by Rev. Cunningham that sought to recruit settlers to his new town. While in the area, he had decided that he wanted to see “Aurora” for himself.

To say the least, he had not been impressed. Rev. Cunningham’s advertisement apparently promised a bustling little town that already had churches, shops, a physician’s office, elegant homes, and other “fine edifices.”

Instead, John Veritas wrote, he found that his white friends there still called the area “Betty Town” and barely remembered hearing anything about a town called “Aurora.”

All that he found there, he said, was “one dwelling house, a schoolhouse, the ruins of an old house, [and] pine and gum saplings.”

Along one side of the schoolhouse, he reported, someone had scribbled a bit of graffiti.

BETTY TOWN, if you are so soon done for—

I wonder what you was ever begun for?

I could be wrong, but I assume that was the schoolhouse that had served Betty Town’s children.

By that time, Isaiah Hodge had already died. The house in ruins, as we will see, was evidently that of his widow, Betty Hodge, and the surviving house was that of her son and his family.

If any of Betty Town’s other families remained on the land, John Veritas had not been shown their homes.

After seeing “Aurora,” the visitor compared Rev. Cunningham’s real estate ad to “a patent medicine advertisement recommending pills efficacious in the cures of all diseases …”

John Veritas’s letter in the Raleigh Times elaborated further on his visit to Beaufort County.

According to the local people with whom he spoke:

… a speculating land gambler came down there, fixing his eye upon this spot as an eligible site, turned up a claim to it, and supposing it an easy matter to get clear of these old negroes, he ordered them to leave the premises.”

The “speculating land gambler” was of course Rev. Cunningham.

Evidently, Betty Hodge and her son did not succumb to the minister’s threats. According to the anonymous letter, they even sought out legal counsel from a prominent white attorney in the county seat.

John Veritas continued:

“They were then threatened with violence … A few weeks later, in the bitter cold of December, [Cunningham] procured a lawless vagabond … to undermine the chimneys to the old woman’s house …”

According to John Veritas, Betty Hodge still did not relent.

 “Finding this cruel heartless act not sufficient to accomplish his purposes, with a gang of lawless ruffians, at a late hour, on a dark, cold, freezing night, attacked the old house, pulling down portions of it and tearing the roof off, drove the old woman forth exposed to the inclement, freezing frost of a winter’s night ….”

In his letter, John Veritas claimed that Cunningham’s thugs then went next door and “inhumanely beat” Betty Hodge’s son and daughter-in-law. Their crime, he was told, was daring to consult the attorney in Washington about their right to hold onto their land.

At the end of his letter, John Veritas indicated that, according to his friends in Beaufort County, justice was somehow served in the end and “the old woman restored to her land.”

That was not true or, if it was, Betty Hodge did not remain in Betty Town for very long.

By the time the U.S. census taker reached that part of Beaufort County later in 1860, Betty Hodge and her family were not there. I do not know exactly when or how they left, but Betty Town was gone.

I do not feel clear about where they went. According to Bonner’s 1916 history of Aurora that I quoted earlier, they left North Carolina and emigrated to Ohio.

However, I have not succeeded in locating Betty Hodge or any of her family in the federal censuses of Ohio in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries. The only mention of them that I have found anywhere was in a brief part of Bonner’s article that I have not yet discussed.

In that section of his article, Bonner writes:

“About 1885 …, some of Isaiah Hodge[‘s] heirs returned, employed E. S. Simmons and entered suit against the citizens of the [Aurora].”

Attorney E. S. Simmons (1855-1907)

Enoch Spencer Simmons was an attorney in Washington, N.C. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he was originally from Hyde County, just across the Pamlico River from South Creek.

In 1898, Simmons published a book-length essay called A Solution to the Negro Problem of the South.

In that essay, he proposed that southern whites forcibly remove all of the South’s Black citizens from their land and relocate them to an all-black colony that he proposed the U.S. Government create in the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

I do not think you would be mistaken if you took Simmons’ background as evidence of the quality of legal representation that was available to the state’s black citizens in the late 19^th century.

In that 1916 article, R. T. Bonner continued:

“This suit fell through owing to the fact that an unrecorded deed from Sheriff Ellison to Isaiah Respess was found in the safe of Capt. Wilson Farrow who married the only child of Isaiah Respess.”

Isaiah and Betty Hodge’s descendants had not made a claim against Rev. Cunningham, but instead sought damages for what they believed to be the illegal confiscation of their land by Isaiah Respass.

On one of my trips to the State Archives, I looked for the case in the superior court indexes but did not find it. However, I might have missed it; I think it might be worth re-checking.

Few historical records could tell us more about Betty Town, and court filings would also give us a least something from the perspective of the people who lost their homes and land.

The Rev. Cunningham returned to the former site of Betty Town after the Civil War. His claim to the land was recognized by law by that time. Over the next few years, he would welcome new settlers, establish a church, and operate a hotel in the new town of Aurora.

His interests however were rather far ranging. In a New Bern newspaper from 1865, I found an advertisement in which he was selling 1,500 acres of “tar and turpentine land” in Beaufort County.

According to the Charlotte Observer Dec. 5, 1877, edition, he was expelled from the Methodist church district conference for “immorality” in 1877.

The town of Aurora was officially incorporated on the former site of Betty Town in 1880. It grew into a bustling little market town later in the 19^th century, and then into an important regional center for truck farming after the railroad’s arrival in or about 1911.

Today Aurora is best known for being home to one of the largest open pit phosphate mines in North America and for a very nice museum that highlights the marine fossils found at the mine.

I do not know if anyone knows more than this about Betty Town. But I hope that I will find out when I publish this story. I cannot help hoping that somebody, somewhere, maybe even a descendent of the people who lost their homes and land, will see this story and reach out to me.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Today I am remembering a trip last fall, when my wife traveled to a conference in Cape Neddick, Maine, and I went with her. It was a lovely area — the wild and rocky seacoast, the salt marshes, the bogs, all of it.

While we were there, we took a few extra days to explore that southern part of the Maine coast. We drove up to the old Shaker settlement in Alfred. We visited Winslow Homer’s studio at Prout’s Neck. We went bird watching at Biddeford Pool. We hiked in the Kennebunk Barrens.

One drizzly day though, while Laura was at her conference, I drove down to the Portsmouth Atheneum, a venerable old library located in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 15 miles south of Cape Neddick.

Located on the Piscataqua River, which is the dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire, Portsmouth was one of New England’s most important seaports in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Founded in 1817, the Portsmouth Athenaeum is above all a library of America’s maritime history. Its books, manuscripts, maps, art, and relics speak to the distinctive maritime heritage of Portsmouth and of the Piscataqua’s lesser seaports, shipyards, and fishing villages.

But the Athenaeum’s collections were not only of local interest. Shipping and shipbuilding tied the region’s seaports to the whole North Atlantic. In the library’s collections, you can learn about the places where local merchant vessels did business, and sometimes where they came for refuge or even to their end.

One of those places, as we’ll see, was the North Carolina coast.

My special interest — aside from the popover shop across the street from the Athenaeum (worth the trip) — was a collection of historical manuscripts in the library’s collection that date to the early 1800s.

They are the records of the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co., a firm that was based in Portsmouth and specialized in insuring local merchant sailing vessels and their cargos.

The company was in business from 1802 to 1822. During that time, it occupied the handsome, three-story brick building in Market Square that is now the home of the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

When the insurance firm closed in 1822, the board of directors passed the building onto the Athenaeum. Evidently, when they moved in, the library’s caretakers discovered the company’s business records had been left in the building’s vault. They became the first, or one of the first, groups of historical manuscripts in the library’s collection.

For me, as a historian of the North Carolina coast, the most compelling manuscripts in the insurance company’s records were the claims reports of shipwrecks and storm damage that had some connection to the Outer Banks and other parts of the North Carolina coast.

Only half a dozen of the company’s claims reports involved the North Carolina coast. Nevertheless, I found them a riveting look at seagoing life in that day and time, and most definitely worth the trip from Cape Neddick.

(Again, I would have made the trip for the popovers, so the manuscripts were gravy.)

I found the sworn affidavits in the claims reports the most exhilarating. Most were firsthand recollections of mariners who had lived through a storm or a wreck that had led to an insurance claim.

When I read those affidavits, I felt as if I could almost hear the voices of those seamen as they struggled through storms that came perilously close to sending them to the bottom of the sea.

-2-

Some of the oldest insurance claims that I found related to the North Carolina coast, I mean, were those of the brig, Alligator. According to the claims report, she limped battered and beaten up the Cape Fear River and anchored off Wilmington, on the first day of February 1805.

The insurance company’s policy on the Alligator was a bit of a dry read, but I found far more drama in the testimony of John Stavers, one of the mariners who served on the Alligator.

According to Stavers’ testimony, given before a notary in Wilmington, the Alligator had sailed from Portsmouth to Martinique, which at that time was a French colony where most of the inhabitants were enslaved African laborers imprisoned on sugar plantations.

On Nov. 24, 1804, the Alligator left Martinique, bound for Portsmouth, with a hold full of the ill-gotten molasses and sugar.

She quickly ran into foul weather. In his account of the Alligator’s misfortunes, Stavers testified, “That they had very cloudy hazy weather attended with storms, ice and snow for nearly 30 days….”

The Alligator finally made land on Dec. 1, but a heavy gale out of the north-northwest brought in “a rough sea and very hard freezing weather” that pushed them back out to sea.

Stavers testified that two of his fellow sailors had “their feet frozen.” Another of his mates fell sick, leaving the Alligator shorthanded in the storm.

On Jan. 5, things got worse. Stavers recalled that four more crewmen fell sick and were incapacitated.

Soon the storm also began to take a toll on the Alligator. He and his shipmates were hit, Stavers said, with “severe freezing weather and strong gales of wind from W.N.W.”

The heavy seas sprung the brig’s mainmast.

Then, he told the notary, “the bulk-head labored, and the water ways complaining and one of the Plank shares washed off, and the sails and rigging [were] much cut with the ice—some of the chain bolts carried away, and one of the topmast back stays, [so] they tore away before the wind for the Port of Wilmington N.C.”

He testified that they did so for “the preservation of their lives.” According to Stavers, the brig’s master did not believe that they could make any other port before the Alligator fell to pieces.

Stavers ended his report by telling the notary that they had barely made it to the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

“They had heavy gales of wind with snow and ice with a rough sea,” he swore.

The Alligator struggled to make it through the storm, taking in a great deal of water, until finally, on Feb. 1, 1805, “they came to anchor up the River near Wilmington.”

-3-

Many of the claims reports also featured the sworn testimony of local port officials and shipyard workers.

That testimony focused on their evaluations of the extent of a vessel’s damage, the necessity of repair, the costs of the repairs and what shipyards and maritime tradesmen did the work.

With respect to the Alligator, for instance, the claims report includes the port wardens’ assessment of the damage that the brig had suffered and of the extent of the repairs that had been done in a Wilmington shipyard.

The report also provided a rundown of the tradesmen who worked on the Alligator and a list of the ship chandlers who supplied the materials for the repairs.

The list of the shipyard workers included those I rarely see in seaport records. In this case, the appraisals, receipts, and job orders listed two ship’s carpenters, William Thidden and Thomas Hunter; a sailmaker, Bethel Gentry; a blacksmith named London Harris; and a block maker named either William Bells or William Bills. (The name was hard to read.)

They also indicated that John Woods led the repairs of the Alligator’s rigging, while John Lord supplied planking for the repairs and a merchant named Richard Langdon supplied naval stores.

There was also a rather general bill from a ship chandler, David Smith. He evidently supplied cordage, rudder iron, new spars, and even 13 barrels of flour and 2 boxes of fish that were apparently crew rations either for the voyage home or for the period while they were waylaid in Wilmington.

-4-

Around the same time, another vessel insured by the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co., the brig Rockingham, grounded at Currituck Inlet, on the northern end of the Outer Banks.

In the claims files for the incident, I read that the Rockingham’s master, Nathaniel F. Adams, gave sworn testimony that he and his crew had sailed from the British colony of Grenada, in the Windward Islands, bound for Norfolk, Virginia, on Christmas Eve 1803.

Capt. Adams did not indicate the Rockingham’s cargo, but Grenada was another notorious slave labor colony and had recently repressed yet another slave rebellion.

Over a period of 125 years, the British, and the French before them, had shipped an estimated 125,000 Africans to Grenada to serve as their workforce there.

By 1803, when the Rockingham was there, the vast majority of the island’s slaves were confined on sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco plantations. When the brig sailed for Norfolk, its hold was likely full of the products that they had been forced to produce, most likely sugar, rum, and/or molasses.

According to Capt. Adam’s testimony, the Rockingham had a “pleasant breeze” and smooth sailing for the first few weeks of the voyage.

That changed on the 17^th of January 1804. On that date, the captain testified, “a heavy Gale from the northward and westward … blew us off the coast again and continued heavy Gales from the northward and westward until Saturday the 21^{st .”}

For a day they enjoyed fair winds again, as they found themselves nearing Chesapeake Bay.

But only a few hours later, on January 22^nd, a northeasterly snowstorm hit the Rockingham, pushed her back south, and pressed her hard against a lee shore. Soon her crew was struggling desperately to keep her beyond the breakers.

Captain Adams reported:

“… a Heavy Gale the wind about NE bent our cables, close leafed our Topsails & [illegible] up our Foresail[,] the Gale still Increasing and snowing tremendously…. 11 AM saw the land on our lee beam close on board[,] then wore ship and stood to the southward….”

As Adams continued, he recalled that the Rockingham “… just cleared the breakers, continued on to the south and nearly in the breakers the sea making one continual break over us until ½ past 4 PM.”

At that point, he testified, “finding it impossible to keep off any longer,” he made the decision to run the brig onto the beach at Currituck Inlet, a desperate move but the only one he had.

He did so, he said, “for the preservation of our lives and what of our property we could save….”

At the time that Capt. Adams gave his testimony, the Rockingham was still grounded at Currituck Inlet. She was evidently battered and beaten, but must have found a decent place to go aground.

Only nine months later, in fact, a Baltimore newspaper reported that the Rockingham was back at sea.

She had arrived in Portsmouth, Virginia, having sailed from Turks Island, presumably with a cargo of salt. (Baltimore American, 31 Oct. 1804, courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.)

I am not sure why, but I did not find any record of the damage to the Rockingham, its cargo losses, or any potential casualties in the insurance records at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

The intent of Capt. Adams’ account was clear, however. He sought to convince the insurance company’s appraisers that the brig’s damages were due to an act of God, and thus insured, rather than a result of recklessness or poor seamanship, and thus not covered by the company’s policy.

-5-

A couple months after the Rockingham ran aground at Currituck Inlet, another vessel insured by the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co. was also struggling off the Outer Banks.

This was the sloop Polly, which sailed out of York, Maine, a seaport 10 miles north of Portsmouth.

In a claims report dated `March 1804, the Polly’s master, Henry Donnell, his first mate Joseph Vondy, and seaman William D. Molton described a voyage from St. Martin to New Bern, North Carolina.

St. Martin, or St. Maarten, is another island in the Caribbean, the northern side of which was a French colony and the southern side of which was a Dutch colony.

At the turn of the 18^th century, when the Polly traded there, the large majority of the island’s population were enslaved African laborers.

The Polly sailed from St. Martin on the 4^th of March. The sloop enjoyed fair winds until the 24^thof March “when the wind blowing a gale …  carried away the jib stay . . ., and in about two hours after, carried away the back of the mainsail.” 

The three mariners added: “The wind still continuing to blow a gale[,] they sprung the bowsprit at about 12 o’clock.”

On the 25^th of March, they were given a respite. “The wind blew fresh, they took in the jib & set the foresail…. The wind [proved] moderate the latter part of the day, they set the jib and shook the reefs out of the mainsail & stood to the Northward….”

 Two days later though, a gale hit them with new force, “the wind coming on to blow violently at one o’clock P.M.”

The storm carried away the Polly’s main boom and shredded the foresail “all to pieces.”

The gale kept coming. Even two days later, on the 28^th, to quote the claims report again, “the wind continued to blow with great violence & a heavy sea.” Soon the winds sprung the main mast and carried away the cross trees and much of what little was left of the sails.

The Polly was left adrift. The crew spent the next day making a new foresail out of old canvas and repairing the rigging.

They then continued to stagger toward Ocracoke Inlet, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

On the 2^nd of April, they finally made land north of Cape Hatteras, then ran past Diamond Shoals. By noon the next day, the Polly had reached the bar at Ocracoke Inlet.

They anchored by the inlet that night. The next morning, an Ocracoke pilot sailed out to the Polly and guided her through the inlet and into safe harbor behind Portsmouth Island.

“The current setting strong and the wind being light, they did not get over the Bar until three o’clock P.M. and at four ‘clock came to with the best Bower in Wallace’s Channel, and on the 7^th following they arrived at New Bern…”.

At that time, New Bern might as well have been a port in the West Indies, by the look and feel of the place.

The large numbers of enslaved Africans, the multitude of languages spoken along the docks, and the vibrancy of the songs heard in the town’s streets– all gave the little port that feeling. Indeed, to many visitors, the seaport seemed a far outpost of the Caribbean Sea.

The Polly’s crew must have felt right at home, surrounded, as they were, by seamen from far and wide, and of many races and creeds, many of whom, like them, knew the perils of the sea.

-6-

In the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co.’s records, I also found three other claims for damages that involved the North Carolina coast. The oldest of those manuscripts, an affidavit dated Nov. 25, 1804, concerned the schooner Dolphin, Ephraim Sutton, master.

That affidavit gave few details but made clear that the Dolphin had been damaged in a storm while sailing from Cape Fear to Portsmouth the previous October.

Another claim, also lacking in detail, concerned a brig named the Reward. According to that claim, the Reward “was cast on shore, at a place called Ocracock, on the coast of North Carolina” either in the last weeks of 1804 or the first weeks of 1805.

A final claim for damages involved a brig called the Forest, another vessel that sailed out of York, Maine. That claim concerned a relatively minor incident, but it provided some interesting details.

In the winter of 1817, the Forest had sailed from Basse-Terre, one of the islands that made up the French colony of Guadeloupe.

At that time, almost 90 percent of Guadeloupe’s population, some 90,000 men, women, and children in all, were enslaved Africans who had been taken from their homelands and forced to work on the colony’s plantations (or were the first generation’s children and grandchildren).

According to the affidavit of Capt. John Perkins, the brig’s master, the Forest left Guadeloupe, presumably having filled its hold with sugar or other goods produced by those enslaved Africans.

 She was bound for Portsmouth but was waylaid evidently by storms on the North Carolina coast.

As Capt. Perkins testified, he and his crew “arrived off Cape Fear and saw Bald Head Light House on the 20^th of … February, and made a signal for a pilot.”

With a gale rising from the south, none of local pilots responded to the Forest’s signal. Fearful of running the inlet without a pilot, Capt. Perkins ordered the crew to anchor outside of the Cape Fear River’s bar for the night.

The strength of the storm continued to grow throughout the night. By first light, the seas had grown so nasty that the captain “judged it would be unsafe to lay any longer at anchor.”

He decided “that it would be most prudent, and was necessary, for the safety of the Crew, as well as the preservation of the Vessel and Cargo, to slip the Cable… and make …  his way in over the Bar, without a Pilot.”

The Forest’s crew “slipped the cable,” abandoning the anchor and chain, and managed to make it  over the bar and into a safe harbor.

As I did not find any record of damage to the Forest, I assumed that the insurance claim was for the loss of the brig’s anchor and cable, a relatively small but not inconsequential expense.

Seen in that light, the level of detail in the claims report was meant make it plain that slipping the cable was necessary, given the storm’s dangers, rather than an act of panic or foolhardiness.

-7-

By the time I finished at the Athenaeum, a hard rain was falling. The library’s last patron, other than me, had gone home, and one of the curators and I walked around the library together.

He told me who was who in the old oil paintings, and we talked about the relics, seemingly in every nook and cranny, that had come from sea voyages and distant seaports many years ago.

It was a cozy way to spend a day, listening to the rain and getting swept up in the scenes of shipwrecks and storms that were described in the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co.’s records.

At lunchtime, when it was only drizzling, I had walked down to the banks of the Piscataqua, and then over to where, long ago, the waterfront district called Puddle Dock used to be.

Once upon a time, salt marshes and oyster bays were found on that edge of the seaport. Built up over the water, ramshackle fish houses, sailors’ boardinghouses, canneries, and ship chandleries had stood there. Perhaps a brothel, dance hall, and tavern or two, or three, as well.

A sailor’s world. Sea-salt air. Grimy. Raw sewage in the tidal creeks. People of all colors and faiths. People that had been places, most of them. Had seen things. Knew things. Full of life.

The marsh and oyster beds are long gone now, filled in, replaced with a park and a lovely museum and cobbled streets that at least on a cold and rainy day were empty, quiet, and still.

As I walked those misty vacant streets, my thoughts turned back to the records that I had been reading at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

I thought about all the slave colonies I had seen listed just in the few claims reports that I had been looking at– Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grand Turk, St. Maarten and St. Martin.

And I thought of the seaports on the North Carolina coast, which were not that different, their business grounded in shipping the crops that enslaved laborers grew, the lumber they cut, the fish they caught.

As I came out of the rain and into the Athenaeum, I thought as well of the first-person accounts of shipwrecks and storms that I had been reading that morning.

I thought of those sailors on that lee shore at Currituck Banks, looking out over the breakers, eyeing their end.

I thought about all those on the Alligator, the Polly, and the Rockingham, the Forest, the Reward, and the Dolphin. I imagined them watching the waves roll over the decks, the dark and endless sea all around them.

I thought as well of the people on the nearest shores. Perhaps someplace like Ocracoke Island or, closer to where I grew up, Cape Lookout.

I imagined them: the sky still clear, maybe just the first signs of trouble visible on the horizon. I saw them walking along the beach and scavenging driftwood or digging clams or watching over children playing in tidal pools, unknowing, like all of us, of all that was happening out in the great, wide sea.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

From Cecelski: This is the 26th photograph in my photo-essay “Working Lives”– looking at the stories behind the photographs in the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection (1937-1953) at the State Archives in Raleigh.

In this photograph, we see workers slaughtering and canning sea turtles at a cannery in Marshallberg, N.C., September 1938.

According to a story in the Raleigh News & Observer that was published a year earlier, March 21, 1937, the cannery’s owner, Carroll Crocket, hailed from Crisfield, Maryland, one of the busiest fishing ports on the Chesapeake Bay.

In the 1890s, Crockett’s father, A.R. Crockett, was among a group of Crisfield oyster dealers that began coming south in search of new oystering grounds. He was drawn above all to Core Sound and particularly to the stretch of quiet bays and marshlands between Harkers Island and Smyrna.

In or about 1897, he established an oyster cannery at Marshallberg, a village located on that part of Core Sound.

The village sits on a a peninsula shaped by Core Sound, a lovely bay called Sleepy Creek, and a body of water called the Straits that runs between Marshallberg and Harkers Island.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Crisfield fishermen also played an important role in bringing the soft-shell crab industry to Marshallberg. In the late 1930s, when this photograph was taken, soft-shell crabbing was still a big business on Core Sound and Marshallberg was home to the state’s busiest soft-shell crab fishery.

A.R. Crockett’s oyster cannery does not seem to have lasted very long. However, following in his father’s footsteps, Carroll Crockett opened his cannery in Marshallberg in 1937.

At that time, Marshallberg was a threadbare but bustling little village. If you had visited that part of Down East in those days, you would have found a cluster of homes, a highly regarded boatyard, a crowd of fish houses, a crab-packing plant, two or three general stores, a pair of churches, and a school.

In the 1930s, Marshallberg was also an important shipping point for local truck crops, especially sweet potatoes.

A generation earlier, the village had also been the site of an important preparatory school called Graham Academy. Launched by northern missionaries after the Civil War, the Star of Bethlehem Church, most often just called the “Star Church” by locals, got its early support from women associated with the Methodist Missionary Society of Boston in 1874.

Founded 12 years later, in 1888, the academy was renown for providing a classical education to the children of oystermen and fisherwomen, as well as to the well-heeled from many other parts of eastern North Carolina, and for turning out some of the the region’s finest teachers.

The academy also had a lasting impact on Marshallberg. Again and again, old-time Marshallbergers have told me how the school’s teachers, the influx of students from other parts of eastern North Carolina, and the cultural events held at the school shaped them and gave the village a somewhat different air than other villages Down East.

Though Marshallberg remained a busy fishing port in the 1930s, the Great Depression was still hard in the village, as it was on all of Down East. For many people, soul-cripplingly hard.

To learn more about Marshallberg’s history, be sure to visit the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. The museum’s webpage also includes a special section on Marshallberg’s history.

In addition, in 1938 many local people were still just getting their feet back on the ground after the great 1933 hurricane.

The ’33 storm had laid waste to much of Marshallberg. According to news reports, the hurricane washed away docks, fish houses, and boats by the score and destroyed or seriously damaged some 30 homes.

When the cannery opened in 1937, Carroll Crockett announced that he expected to employ some 150 seasonal workers. Given the hard times, the Marshallbergers must have welcomed the cannery’s arrival.

In addition to the cannery in Marshallberg, Carroll Crockett established at least half-a-dozen other canneries on the North Carolina coast in the 1930s and ’40s: a shrimp cannery in Wilmington, oyster canneries in Beaufort and Washington, and canneries focused more on tomatoes and other truck produce in Kinston, New Bern and Windsor.

* * *

According to the News & Observer, the Marshallberg cannery’s workers canned tomatoes in the summertime.

Then, in the fall and winter, they shucked and canned oysters and clams.

Shucking clams and oysters was cold, wet work, hard on the body and not infrequently debilitating. Many a time, when I was younger and more of them were still with us, the men and women who used to do that kind of work in Down East canneries told me how it made them feel old before their time.

On the other hand, Marshallberg’s people were no strangers to hard work, and times were hard. Few turned down a job because it wasn’t easy, if only because there were no easy jobs to be had.

Evidently, when they had neither clams nor oysters, nor tomatoes or other truck crops, they at least occasionally turned to canning sea turtles.

* * *

I am not aware of any cannery on the North Carolina coast that focused primarily on sea turtles.

In the late 19th century, such canneries did exist for a short time in the Florida Keys and in a few places on the Gulf of Mexico, where the most desirable of sea turtles for making turtle soup — green turtles, (Chelonia mydas) — were far more abundant than on the North Carolina coast.

Those canneries in Key West and the Gulf Coast did not last long. Even by the 1890s, the mass killing of sea turtles, as well as the harvesting of their eggs, had driven them close to extinction in many parts of the Florida and Texas coast.

As early as 1900, the sea turtle fisheries in Florida and other parts of the Gulf Coast had, with one or two exceptions, shut down. From that time on, the harvesting of sea turtles was done almost exclusively for local consumption or when sea turtles were caught as “by-catch” by fishermen engaged in other fisheries.

The highly prized green turtles were also found in North Carolina’s coastal waters, but far less frequently than in more tropical seas.

Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) were far more common on the North Carolina coast.

Though their meat was darker, oilier, and considered less desirable than that of green turtles, loggerheads were still sold to be used in turtle soup. I can’t be sure, but I assume that loggerheads made up the bulk of the sea turtles caught on the Outer Banks and other parts of the North Carolina coast.

The luxury market for turtle soup was always the driving force behind the sea turtle fishery in the United States. However, the oil of sea turtles was also put to use at least occasionally. According to an article called “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries” that appeared in NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Review in 1994, the oil of loggerhead turtles was sometimes sold as a leather softener and fishermen in some places coated the bottom of their boats with loggerhead oil in order to discourage worm damage.

Compared to Florida or the Caribbean, a far smaller fishery for sea turtles had existed on the North Carolina coast since at least the 1880s.

In 1885, for instance, according to the June 9, 1885, issue of New Bern’s Daily Journal, a man identified as “Mr. K. Willis” was “the champion turtle hunter” on the waters around Swansboro.

The newspaper reported that Mr. Willis used a 20- or 30-yard-long, wide-meshed net to capture  29 “large sea turtle” over a two-day period.

More than likely, he was the kind of man that did a little bit of everything around the water, a “progger,” they would have called him on some parts of the North Carolina coast.

However, on most parts of the North Carolina coast, a fisherman or woman might make a turtle stew now and then, but they were unlikely to make much profit from catching them.

* * *

That could be seen on Hatteras Island in 1901. According to a visitor to the island that winter, the keeper at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse spied a dozen sea turtles just offshore a couple weeks before Christmas.

Writing in the Baltimore Sun March 31, 1902, the visitor recalled that the lighthouse keeper used some kind of meat as bait to catch three of the turtles with a hook and line.

The Sun’s correspondent asked the lighthouse keeper what he had done with the sea turtles.

According to the article, “he replied that there was no market there, and the lighthouse crowd didn’t eat turtles, so he sent them as a present to the Cape station of life savers, where they were acceptable.”

I think that was quite typical on the Outer Banks, where, to my knowledge, there were never any canneries that handled sea turtles.

Of course at that time, there were also no restaurants on Hatteras Island that might have been interested in putting turtle soup on their menu. There were no restaurants at all on the island. For that matter, no bridges to the island had yet been built and no roads on the island had yet been paved.

Now and then, an Outer Banks waterman might stow a live sea turtle in a shipment of salt mullet or shad and make a few dollars if it found a buyer at the docks in Norfolk or New Bern or Elizabeth City.

But overall, at least on the Outer Banks, sea turtles were generally one of the sea’s creatures that the islanders kept for themselves and, even then, partook of only every once and awhile.

* * *

On the Outer Banks, that did not seem to change later in the 20th century. On April 7, 1929, for instance, a correspondent of the News & Observer reported that Ocracoke Island fishermen had recently captured “dozens of sea turtles weighing from 200 to 500 pounds.”

The turtles, he said, were bound either for local kitchens or cast back into the sea.

“Here the natives bring the turtles ashore and make soup or hash from them, or if they are not in a turtle eating notion they throw them overboard as there is hardly any market for this species of turtle.”

There were canneries just to the south, though.

Even in the late 1800s, canneries operated in North Carolina’s larger coastal towns, including Morehead City and Beaufort, but now and then also in some of the more remote fishing villages along Core Sound.

For a few years, for instance, a Long Island, New York, company operated a clam cannery in Atlantic, called Hunting Quarters then. Smyrna was home to an oyster cannery, and there was even a cannery or two at Diamond City, out on the island called Shackleford Banks, prior to all the villagers leaving the island in the late 19th and early 20th century.

How often, if at all, those canneries handled sea turtles, I do not know. Their real business was elsewhere — in oysters, above all — but perhaps like the cannery in Marshallberg, they may sometimes have slaughtered and canned sea turtles on a small scale when the turtles were available and the cannery workers did not have anything more profitable to do.

As was always the case with catching and butchering the sea’s larger creatures — whales, dolphins, sharks — sea turtle canning was a grim business.

A casual visitor with a weak stomach or a soft spot for the welfare of wild animals was bound to be alarmed by a visit to any of those enterprises.

In September 1938, the same month this photograph was taken, such an individual did visit the cannery in Marshallberg.

That individual’s name was Edward Peyton “Ted” Harris, and he was a playwright and theater actor originally from Greenville.

I do not know how Harris came to be in Marshallberg. Judging from the timing of a letter that he wrote to the Raleigh News & Observer, he and the photographer who took this photograph very likely visited the cannery together.

I only know about Ted Harris’s tour of the cannery because the News & Observer published his letter. In that letter, he expressed outrage over the treatment of the sea turtles at the Marshallberg cannery.

He had seen the holding pen in which the sea turtles were kept until it was time to slaughter them. That was standard practice: sea turtle canneries typically kept captured turtles alive until the workers had enough to make it worth their while to slaughter and can them. In some cases, that was days, but in other cases they were held in captivity for weeks or months.

Of the turtles’ living conditions at the cannery, Ted Harris wrote:

“Yesterday… an attendant showed us a dozen sea-turtles penned up for slaughter. Boxes hedged them about on a dry concrete floor. There was  no provision for feeding them or giving them the water they need worse than food. One had already died. The workman assured us … that this one would not become the main ingredient for some unsuspecting purchaser’s soup. However, those that remained alive could not be in good condition when the ax ends their suffering.”

In his letter, Harris indicated that he wanted to bring the sea turtles’ living conditions to the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as well as to the local health department.

He also noted, by way of a coda, that the worker that was his tour guide at the cannery had told him, on the side, that “he himself would never eat canned turtle, having watched the canning.”

 * * *

The Status of Sea Turtles Today

In a 1994 article titled “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries,” a NOAA marine scientist named W. N. Witzell wrote:

“Commercial fisheries, habitat destruction, and pollution has had a devastating impact on both U.S. and world sea turtle populations. The U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 and subsequent amendments has provided the legislation needed to prevent the extinction of these magnificent animals in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean [including the North Carolina coast].”

Today, with the aide of the N.C. Wildlife Commission’s NC Sea Turtle Project, more than 20 different community groups are monitoring sea turtle nesting and stranding activities on the North Carolina coast. (You can find a list here.)

At the same time, state and federal agencies are increasingly working hand-in-hand with the commercial fishing industry to protect sea turtles from being accidentally caught in fishing nets.

Through their efforts, sea turtle populations have begun making a significant comeback in recent decades.

Much progress has been accomplished in the last half century. However, recent political developments in the U.S. have put into doubt the future of sea turtles and all other endangered species that rely on the protections of the Endangered Species Act, the vitality of the Environmental Protection Agency, and/or the ongoing research work of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, all of which have played key roles in the preservation of sea turtles here in the U.S. and around the world.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

As I looked through an extraordinary group of historical photographs at the State Archives in Raleigh, I found a group of old photographs taken during the Second World War that surprised me.

Some of the photographs show local fishermen harvesting seaweed in the waters off Beaufort in the summer of 1944. Others show the inner workings of a factory in Beaufort that was established during the war to process that seaweed into a jelly-like substance called agar.

Produced by extracting polysaccharides from the cell walls of certain species of seaweed in the red algae family (Rhodophyta), agar has dozens of uses today.

Many of them are culinary. Others have to do with the pharmaceutical industry, medical research, and health care.

Agar is even used in the textile industry, food preservation, and brewing.

However, if you are like me, you remember agar for just one of those uses. Like medical researchers and basic scientists around the world, my high school biology teachers used agar as a growth medium for bacteria. The translucent gel that lined the bottom of our petri dishes was agar.

By using agar, we could grow bacterial cultures on our own, and our teachers could help us to understand the basic properties of bacteria, one of the most ubiquitous forms of life on Earth.

In those petri dishes, that thin layer of agar served as a solid, stable, and nutritious surface for the bacteria to grow, and one that would not be eaten up by the bacteria before we could plumb its secrets.

In the photographer’s notes on the agar factory in Beaufort, I was also surprised to see repeated references to Pivers Island, the small island that is just across the channel from Beaufort and is home to the Duke University Marine Laboratory and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Beaufort laboratory.

The notes were rather obscure, but they made clear that scientists on Pivers Island at the Duke marine lab and at the U.S. Government Fisheries Laboratory, a predecessor of NOAA, or both had played a central role in the establishment of the agar factory in Beaufort.

I felt a little chastened that I had not previously heard a single word about the agar industry in Beaufort or Pivers Island.

I grew up only 20 miles from both Beaufort and Pivers Island. I even lived on the Pivers Island for four months back in 1981, when I was a student at the Duke marine lab. I was a history and botany double major at Duke.

My mother even went to school on Pivers Island during the Second World War. She grew up out in a rural part of Carteret County, but she attended Beaufort High School during the Second World War.

She was a senior when the school burned down over the Christmas holidays in 1944.

My mother’s class finished its senior year on Pivers Island. Her classes met in buildings that were usually used by the marine lab’s summer students.

On several occasions, I have done historical research in two libraries on Pivers Island: the Pearse Memorial Library at the Duke Lab and the library next door at what is now called the NCCOS Beaufort Laboratory.

Yet I had somehow never seen any historical accounts of the agar industry. Even after I found these photographs and began to look for articles or books that might have discussed it, I found only a couple of brief accounts that were written 75 years ago by one of the scientists involved in the agar facility.

Needless to say, my curiosity was aroused. As a historian, I have always been interested in the ways that our lives are entangled with the sea and I felt as if I had missed something important.

That curiosity led me on a bit of a deep dive into subjects that I could never have imagined studying: the history of agar, the ecology of seaweed, and the story of the wartime crisis that led to seaweed harvesting and the construction of the agar factory in Beaufort.

* * *

I began my research by learning more about agar and its history. With a little bit of digging, I soon learned that China, Japan, and other East Asian countries had been using seaweeds extensively as food, medicine, and fertilizer since at least the time of Confucious.

The invention of agar came out of that traditional knowledge of seaweeds and their uses.

By all accounts, agar was invented in Japan. The production of agar in Japan was first documented by Western observers around the time of the American Revolution, but it is believed that Japanese cooks had been using agar in soups, desserts, and other foods long before that time.

Agar was the first seaweed product that was traded extensively in international markets.

According to a scientific overview of the agar industry published soon after the Second World War, approximately 500 small factories in Japan were making agar by the turn of the 20th century. By then, Japanese firms were already exporting large quantities of agar to Europe and the Americas.

Scattered over the Japanese main island of Honshu, those factories were what we might call “craft industries” today: local and using traditional, hand-crafted techniques, not reliant on electricity or machinery.

Cooks in Japan first used agar in their kitchens, but agar spread from Japan to cuisines in many parts of East Asia and the Pacific. In fact, the name “agar” comes from a Malay word for red algae, agar-agar.

The first use of agar as a growth medium for bacteria was not in Japan or elsewhere in East Asia, however.

That use for agar first began in Germany in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, scientists in the great German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch’s laboratory first used agar as a growth medium for bacteria.

Using agar, they succeeded in isolating the bacteria that caused tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax for the first time. Discoveries that saved the lives of untold millions.

It was agar’s exceptional ability to serve as a bacterial medium that led to the agar factory in Beaufort.

Prior to 1939, the vast majority of the world’s supply of bacteriological agar came from Japan, where agar was produced mainly from a red seaweed whose scientific name is Gelidium corneum.

With that supply cut off by the war, many U.S. Allies began seeking to develop their own internal sources of agar.

In a time of war, the availability of bacteriological agar was especially important in medicine.

Physicians and microbiologists sometimes relied on agar to grow bacterial cultures in order to identify diseases. More commonly, they relied on agar to produce vaccines and to grow Staphylococcus aureus, one of the leading causes of wound infections, and other bacteria to test the potency of penicillin.

Great Britain was among the first countries that recognized a shortage of agar as a national emergency. Beginning in 1942, British leaders initiated the large-scale harvesting of red seaweeds on England’s west coast and to a lesser extent in Northumberland.

The United States also declared agar a “critical war material” and moved to assure an adequate supply of agar in 1942.

According to an April 1943 AP story, the federal government’s War Production Board, or WPB, froze the nation’s entire stock of agar in 1942, restricting its use to medical and pharmaceutical purposes. In addition, the WPB authorized the creation of a federal stockpile of 750,000 pounds of agar, more than twice what was available in the country at the time.

The AP story also noted that the U.S. had been using approximately 600,000 pounds of agar a year prior to the war, nearly all of it obtained from Japan.

On a quest to develop a domestic supply of agar, the Food and Drug Administration’s E. G. Poindexter seems to have started the inquiry that led to the agar factory on Pivers Island.

On a tour of the southern coast in 1942, Poindexter met with Dr. Harold J. Humm, a young marine scientist at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, which had opened on Pivers Island a few years earlier.

A specialist in marine alga and marine bacteriology, Humm was later the marine lab’s director and eventually founded what is now the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences.

At Pivers Island, Poindexter and Humm discussed the possibilities for locating seaweeds suitable to the production of agar on the East Coast of the United States.

According to an Oct. 5, 1944, Beaufort News article, the War Production Board, based on Poindexter’s recommendation, soon funded Humm to survey sources of red seaweed that could be used to produce agar.

With that support, Dr. Humm explored coastlines from Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys and along the Gulf Coast.

He also began experimenting on making agar with seaweeds found in the vicinity of Pivers Island. By June 1942, he was focusing especially on a red seaweed that locals called “red moss” that was common on the area’s beaches at low tide and in local waters up to a depth of about 60 feet.

Dr. Humm described his research on seaweed and agar in an article called “Agar: A Pre-War Japanese Monopoly” that appeared in the journal Economic Botany in 1947.

A few years later, he published a more comprehensive survey of his work on agar and on the history and uses of agar in general in a chapter of a larger scientific work edited by Donald K. Tressler and J. M. Lemon titled Marine Products of Commerce: Their Acquisition, Handling, Biological Aspects, and the Science and Technology of their Preparation and Preservation (1951).

The experiments showed promise. According to Dr. Humm’s findings, two red seaweeds, Gracilaria confervoides and Gracilaria foliifera, both in a genus commonly called “Irish moss,” were available at commercially viable levels in the intertidal zones on that part of the North Carolina coast.

Persuaded by Dr. Humm’s research, a private firm called the Van Sant Co. began recruiting fishermen to harvest the seaweed and also began fashioning a small experimental facility. I am a bit unclear if that temporary facility was located in Beaufort or on Pivers Island.

The company had been established by Harvey G. Van Sant, the driving force behind a biochemical firm called the American Chlorophyll Company that was based in Washington, D.C.

Several years later, in 1947, Harvey G. Van Sant described the American Chlorophyll Company as “a pioneer in the field of processing and refining natural pigments and vitamins” from organic sources for use in “foods, cosmetics, feeds, and pharmaceuticals.” The Palm Beach Post, April 4, 1947.

During the spring and summer of 1943, the Van Sant Co’s scientists also undertook research on seaweed harvesting methods and on the preparation of agar.

That research was done in cooperation with Dr. Humm, as well as with scientists at the U.S. Government Fisheries Laboratory, also on Pivers Island, and other government fishery scientists.

“We Could See Ships Burning”

One of the scientists who supported the company’s agar research was Dr. Herbert Prytherch, the director of the U.S. Government Fisheries Lab. His son later wrote a brief reminiscence of his childhood that gives a sense of what the Second World War was like in Beaufort that is not revealed in our photographs.

In his excellent history of the U.S. Government Fisheries Lab, NOAA scientist Douglas A. Wolfe quoted Herbert Prytherch, Jr.:

“The port terminal at Morehead City [a half-mile west of Pivers Island] afforded safety for a number of ships, and they would stay there until dark of the moon came each month.

“German submarines would lurk offshore, waiting for these ships to leave the harbor. Late at night we would hear the distant thud of torpedoes and depth charges. Next we would hear endless sounds of airplane engines, followed by more explosions. Sometimes on the morning after, we could see ships burning….

“During these days the beaches were black, covered with oil. Many sailor caps were also found, and sometimes bodies.”

By November 1943, the Van Sant Co. had begun to produce commercial agar, though again I am unsure if those first efforts were undertaken somewhere in Beaufort or on Pivers Island.

Soon local fishermen with boats piled high with tons of seaweed were a not uncommon sight on that part of the North Carolina coast.

The fishermen would say that they were going out “mossing.”

“Thousands of unexpected dollars have found their way into fishermen’s pockets and `mossing’ has begun to take its place with clamming, crabbing, fishing, and other industries,” The Beaufort News announced.

Over the course of that fall, the fishermen delivered an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 tons of seaweed to the company’s dock.

For the old salts at least, collecting seaweed was nothing new, though they had never done it anywhere close to that extent. But old timers still used seaweed as a fertilizer in their gardens, and many fishing people used that same red seaweed to stuff the mattresses where they slept at night.

Sometime that fall of 1943, for reasons that are unclear to me, Harvey Van Sant sold the company to a M.W. Stansfield, a businessman who renamed the firm the Beaufort Chemical Co.

Stansfield also purchased a 40-acre waterfront lot a few miles away in Lennoxville, on the far side of Beaufort, and began to build the agar facility that we see in these photographs from the State Archives.

In a Feb. 21, 1943, article in the Raleigh News & Observer, reporter Amy Muse described how the company’s workers followed a method of making agar that was very similar to the traditional methods used in Japan.

“The [sea] grass is spread out to dry and bleach for several days, during which time it is sprinkled at intervals with sea water. Then the cooking: The grass is boiled in a generous supply of water, resulting in a soupy product. This is strained through cloth and poured into shallow pans, where it solidifies like a clear gelatin. It is from this, through a scientific process, that pure bacteriological agar is obtained.”

Muse left out a step or two, a great deal of filtering, dehydrating, freezing, chemical additives, drying, and milling, but that was it in a nutshell.

I have not found historical records on the quantity of seaweed harvested at the company’s plants, or on the quantity of agar produced at them, or of the company’s profits.

However, I do know that the local agar industry was relatively short-lived. With the support of the War Production Board, the Beaufort Chemical Co. seemed to thrive during the war and played an important part in helping the country to overcome its reliance on Japanese agar.

But by the winter of 1945-46, soon after the war’s ghastly ending at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the company’s leaders were already saying that the local supply of Gracilaria confervoides and Gracilaria foliifera, the “red mosses” necessary to make agar, was dwindling.

The company soon shuttered its facility in Lennoxville and relocated its base of operations to the Florida coast. In 1948, the Beaufort Chemical Co.’s directors declared bankruptcy.

At that time, another company, Sperti, Inc., bought the company’s plant in Lennoxville.

Named for its president, a Cincinnati research scientist named Dr. George Sperti, Sperti, Inc. continued to make bacteriological agar and apparently also agar for culinary and other uses for a few more years.

Today Dr. George Sperti is remembered most often for inventing another product connected to the sea– the hemorrhoid treatment Preparation H. The original formulation of Preparation H included shark liver oil as a central ingredient.

Dr. Sperti closed the facility sometime in 1951 or 1952. Then, in the summer of 1953, the company’s main processing plant on Lennoxville Road, abandoned at the time, burned to the ground. The agar industry’s brief moment on the North Carolina coast was over.

* * *

Special thanks to Douglas A. Wolfe for sharing his extensive knowledge of Pivers Island’s history and the work of its marine laboratories with me. 

This is the 2nd in my “Working Lives” series that looks at the stories behind a collection of historical photographs that were taken on the North Carolina coast between 1937 and 1953. 

The photographs were originally taken for a state agency called the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development. Today they are preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh. 

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

This is a special group of photographs that were taken on the Roanoke River, just west of Plymouth in the spring of 1939. Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they show the last days of two of the oldest herring seine fisheries on the North Carolina coast.

One of the herring fisheries, on the north side of the river, was called Kitty Hawk. The other, on the river’s south bank, was called Slade. They were owned by a local merchant, farmer and banker named W.R. “Roy” Hampton, whose family had operated the two fisheries since the first decade after the Civil War.

This is the first in a series of photo essays I’m writing on working lives on the North Carolina coast just before, during, and after the Second World War. The photographs all come from the N. C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh. 

In an interview with East Carolina University graduate student Charles L. Heath Jr. in 1997, Roy Hampton’s son recalled that the fishermen at his family’s fisheries had historically come from a community called Piney Woods, also known as Free Union, a historic multiracial settlement established by free African Americans and Native Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Over the years, I have written a good bit about the history of the herring fisheries on the Albemarle Sound and on two of its tributaries, the Chowan River, a blackwater stream that flows out of the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Roanoke, which flows out of the Appalachian foothills.

I imagine that the same could be said of all historians who have studied that part of the North Carolina coast in any depth.

For centuries, for millennia really, the herring fisheries were at the very heart of life on those shores.

Yearning to return to the waters where they began their lives, the herring left the Atlantic in the last days of winter and the first days of spring. Since time immemorial, great schools of the fish moved through Outer Banks inlets, passed into Albemarle Sound, and then continued upstream into the rivers and creeks that were their spawning grounds.

In a typical year, millions of fish, maybe billions, made the journey. By the 1840s and 1850s, when thousands of free and enslaved African Americans harvested herring in giant seines a mile or more in length, they sometimes caught 100,000 fish in a single haul and, on rare occasions, as many as half a million.

That was at the great seine fisheries on the Albemarle Sound, which were basically larger versions of the kind of fishery in these photographs from Plymouth. But the silvery little fish were there for one and all. On small creeks and streams, as well as in ditches, even the poorest souls could catch herring with a homemade bow net or a bushel basket.

Despite all I have written about the history of the herring fisheries, these photographs from Plymouth still stood out to me. They may not be as grand and awe-inspiring as some of the photographs, drawings, and paintings I have seen of the seine fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound in earlier times, but I found them at least as compelling.

In the first place, they give us a glimpse at the seine fisheries on the Roanoke. I have previously written a little on the Roanoke’s herring fisheries, but both contemporary accounts and my and the work of other historians has focused far more on the even larger and more eye-opening fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River in the 19th century.

But African American fishermen, both free and enslaved laborers, were hauling herring seines on the Roanoke all that time as well. Even as late as 1896, several hundred fishermen and women operated eight seine fisheries within 10 miles of Plymouth.

Those fisheries included Kitty Hawk and Slade in Plymouth, two others 10 miles upriver in Jamesville, and four more downriver, between Plymouth and the Cashie River.

Each of those fisheries was the center of a little world. Each had its own history and its own folkways. No doubt each had its own celebrations, for there was no time of year when bellies were likely to be fuller or money more abundant.

No doubt each left its own scars too. The work was hard, the hours long — before sunup to past sundown — and the weather was often brutally cold. If ice had to be broken to make a set, ice was broken.

All of those fisheries were bound to the local history of slavery and plantation life, as well as, in many cases, to African American/Indian communities such as Piney Woods/Free Union.

At the very least, these photographs remind us that the Roanoke was once a place of abundance, and that the lives of its people were once bound inextricably to the natural world.

-2-

I also found these photographs compelling because of when they were taken.

The photographer, who was employed by the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, took the last of these photographs in the first few days of May 1939.

A few days later, the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries closed for the last time. For reasons I will discuss shortly, Roy Hampton had decided that the size of the herring catches had fallen so drastically that he could no longer justify the expense of labor, fishing gear and provisions.

The next winter, for the first time since before the Civil War, no seine fishermen made the journey down to the site of the Hampton family’s fisheries. The fishery’s women workers, the African American women who headed, gutted, and often helped salt the fish, also stayed home.

At least on that part of the Roanoke, the age of fishermen hauling the great herring seines and of raucous crowds gathering to watch them and dine on fried herring dinners was over.

Seen in that light, these photographs mark an historic moment: the end of one way of life, the coming of another, yet unknown.

 -3-

A final compelling feature of these photographs concerns the reason that Roy Hampton closed the two fisheries. He and many other fishermen were convinced that the steep decline in herring catches was due to the construction of a giant pulp mill on the Roanoke in 1937.

A division of a large, national wood and paper products corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the North Carolina Pulp Co. located its mill just upriver of the scenes in these photographs.

Plymouth, a small town of a couple thousands residents at that time, had never seen anything like it. The company’s smokestacks came to dominate the town’s skyline, as did the sulfurous smell of its furnaces. The company quickly bought or leased timberlands in at least five coastal counties, and thousands, many of them desperate to get off tenant farms, flocked to Plymouth to get jobs either in the mill or the company’s logging crews.

The arrival of the pulp mill made Plymouth into a “company town,” with the company being the North Carolina Pulp Co.

According to Hampton, the fishermen at the Slade and Kitty Hawk fisheries began seeing dramatic declines in their catches as soon as the pulp mill began releasing wastes into the Roanoke. The river’s waters smelled of sulfur, they claimed, and some reported fish kills.

At the end of the 1939 herring season, Hampton shuttered the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries. He kept them closed in 1940. Then, instead of reopening in 1941, he went to court.

In a pair of state and federal lawsuits, Hampton accused the North Carolina Pulp Co. of dumping untreated or inadequately treated sulphates into the Roanoke, poisoning the river’s waters and destroying the herring fisheries.

In a subsequent federal lawsuit, filed in 1943, Hampton sought $30,000 in damages, an enormous sum in that day. That lawsuit referred to the pulp mill’s wastes as “a wrongful and unlawful trespass and nuisance, destroying the fish inhabiting the water” where his fisheries were located.

At that time, Hampton could do little else. Prior to the Second World War, no state agency had the authority to regulate industrial pollutants or to set standards for pollutants in our waterways.

Federal law also provided very little meaningful regulation of pollutants.

That did not begin to change until the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Act of 1948.

Even then, federal regulation of water quality had little teeth. That did not change until environmental activists succeeded in pushing the Nixon Administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and prompted Congress to pass the Clean Water Act of 1972.

If the Trump Administration lives up to its promises, the EPA will be dismantled over the next four years. The Clean Water Act of 1972 may or may not continue to exist in name, but the protections that it has provided to our rivers and streams, to our fisheries, and to public health will disappear.

-4-

During the Second World War, Roy Hampton’s attorneys had some success in court, winning on issues of standing at the North Carolina Supreme Court and at the U. S. Court of Appeals in Richmond. For a summary of those court rulings, see Hampton v. N. C. Pulpwood Co.

However, the case does not seem to have gone any further. That may have been because of legal rulings in the lower courts, but it may also have been simply that Hampton lost heart and eventually accepted that the pulp mill, not the fisheries, was Plymouth’s future.

-5-

One by one, the last of the Roanoke’s herring seine fisheries closed. Slade and Kitty Hawk were among the last. I am aware of only one other seine fishery that was still in operation at the end of the Second World War.

That seine fishery was in Jamesville, seven miles upriver of the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries.

According to an April 16, 1950, story in the Raleigh News & Observer, that fishery was owned by C.C. Fleming, a businessman and political leader in Jamesville. Gus Hooper, a veteran African American waterman, was the head fisherman and the captain of the fishery’s seine boat.

The Jamesville fishery was still in business in 1955. At that time, the News & Observer April 24, 1955, referred to the seine fishery as “the only one of its type on the entire eastern seaboard.”

That herring season may have been the last for Fleming’s seine fishery. I cannot find any historical references to it after 1955.

Seines versus Bow Nets

I should note that many of the Roanoke’s herring fishermen did not shed tears over the demise of the seine fisheries.

Historically, many of the river’s people believed, probably with good reason, that the big seine fisheries took more than their fair share of herring — and shad, rockfish, perch and other fish to boot. In those people’s eyes, the seine fisheries deprived those of lesser means of food for their dinner tables.

As UNC-Chapel Hill professor Harry Watson showed in a splendid 1996 article in the Journal of American History, the more prosperous owners of seine fisheries and those who lived more hand-to-mouth had battled over access to the migratory fish on that part of the North Carolina coast since the 18th century.

They continued to do so even in the dying days of seine fishing.

C. C. Fleming’s seine fishery in Jamesville was a case in point. In 1952-53, Fleming used his political influence to persuade state legislators to give him a virtual monopoly over herring fishing on a mile-long stretch of the Roanoke.

-6-

Though an ominous sign of things to come, the closing of the seine fisheries in Plymouth and Jamesville did not mean the end of herring fishing on the Roanoke River.

For another half century, the arrival of the herring on the Roanoke remained a festive event. Up and down the river, people continued to catch herring. They just did not use the kinds of large seines, such as the ones in our photographs, that only made financial sense if there was a greater bounty of herring to be had.

Instead, they used a wide variety of lesser gear, including dragnets, bow nets, and even a device called a “fish wheel.”

Over that time, local festivals still celebrated the arrival of the herring. Churches and other community groups marked the season with fried herring dinners. Fresh and salt herring remained staples in local homes.

The herring’s spawning runs continued to decline however. For a time, a herring fishery and cannery was still flourishing 25 miles to the north of Plymouth, on the Chowan River, but even it collapsed in the 1990s.

In response, fishery regulators eventually took the drastic step of banning all herring fishing on North Carolina’s inland waters. They hoped that the herring population would recover some of its health if there was a period of time without any commercial or recreational harvest of the fish.

For the first time in thousands of years, no herring were legally caught on the Albemarle or its tributaries, including the Roanoke, beginning with the spring spawning runs of 2007.

That ban is still in effect. We are still waiting for our waters to be restored. We are still waiting for our rivers to know again an abundance of life. And we are still waiting for the herring to come back home.

-End-

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

I first learned about the Bohemian oyster shuckers who used to work in North Carolina’s oyster canneries almost 40 years ago.

I was living in Swan Quarter that winter, and I still remember how surprised I was when some of the old timers told me how, when they were young, Bohemian immigrants would come from Baltimore and work in a local cannery.

At the time, I wondered how they had come to be there, and what their lives had been like, and where else, besides Swan Quarter, they might have gone.

Many years have passed since those days in Swan Quarter, but I thought maybe it was time to see if I could discover their story.

Here is what I found out.

***

From 1890 until at least 1914, thousands of central and Eastern European immigrants worked in oyster canneries on the North Carolina coast. Typically recruited by “padrones,” or labor agents, in Baltimore, they all came to be known as “Bohemians,” though they had actually immigrated to the United States from many different parts of Europe.

They included men, women and children, all of whom, except for the youngest children, shucked and canned oysters. An unknown number of the men also worked on oyster boats.

Many had actually come from Bohemia, a land of low mountains and plateaus in what is now the Czech Republic. More, however, had left homes in other parts of Europe to come to America.

Among them were especially large numbers of Polish immigrants, but also Serbs, Dalmatians, and other Slavic peoples, Germans, and even Italians. 

For simplicity’s sake, I will also refer to this diverse group of immigrants as “Bohemians,” unless historical sources allow me to identify their nation of origin more precisely. 

By the mid-19th century, Baltimore, Maryland, had become the center of the nation’s oyster industry.

But by the 1880s and 1890s, many of Baltimore’s oyster companies had begun to expand beyond Chesapeake Bay. They began to open canneries both on the North Carolina coast and as far south as Mississippi and Louisiana.

Many of those oyster canneries relied on immigrant laborers who had settled in Fells Point, Camden, and other waterfront neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland. Typically, they transported the Bohemian workers south by train, though some also traveled to the North Carolina coast by steamer.

For a time, the Bohemian immigrants seemed to be in every town and village on the North Carolina coast.

In my survey of coastal newspapers, I found the Bohemians working in oyster canneries in Elizabeth City, Swan Quarter, Belhaven, Washington, Morehead City, Beaufort, Marshallberg, Swansboro and Shallotte.

I suspect that the Bohemians worked in other oyster ports on the North Carolina coast as well, but sources are scant — I cannot be sure.

In some other parts of the coastal South, the Bohemians are at least somewhat better remembered. But, on the North Carolina coast, they seem to have been completely forgotten. To my knowledge, no book, article, or museum exhibit — or blog, podcast or anything else — has ever told their story.

Today I hope that I can take at least a small step toward changing that.

By drawing especially on coastal newspapers, and with help from some wonderful librarians, archivists, and museum curators, I will try to sketch the best portrait I can of the Bohemian oyster shuckers and their lives on the North Carolina coast between 1890 and 1914.

At the John Boyle & Co.’s Cannery at Goat Island

One of the best accounts that I found of the Bohemian oyster shuckers here on the North Carolina coast comes from Elizabeth City, a town on the Pasquotank River, just north of Albemarle Sound, that was transformed by the boom in the oyster industry that began in 1890.

In the spring of 1902, an Elizabeth City attorney and newspaper publisher named Walter L. Cohoon wrote an account of his visit to a large group of Bohemian immigrants that were living and working at the John Boyle & Co.’s oyster cannery on Goat Island.

John Boyle & Co. was one of probably half a dozen or more Baltimore companies that had opened oyster canneries in Elizabeth City since 1890. The company had first located in the town’s Riverside neighborhood, then moved to Goat Island, now called Machele Island, which is located just across the Pasquotank from Elizabeth City’s waterfront.

Cohoon and a friend or two crossed the river in a skiff, then tied up at the oyster cannery’s wharf on Goat Island.

Touring the cannery, they discovered a large force of Bohemian oyster shuckers, “four score of them,” as well as many local African Americans, hard at work.

At that time, the John Boyle & Co.’s workers could, at peak capacity, shuck and can 15,000 bushels of oysters a month, which amounted to some 16,000 cans of oysters a day.

In his newspaper, the Tar Heel, Cohoon wrote, “We listened to the songs of the negroes and to the broken English of the foreign element until becoming tired we turned our attention to the Bohemian quarters.”

They then walked next door to the barracks where the Bohemian workers and their families stayed during the oyster season.

“Here,” Cohoon reported, ” … we found one long room with rows of bunks built along the sides of the building.”

Seasonal and migrant labor camps of that kind were not uncommon on the North Carolina coast in that day, but Cohoon does not seem to have visited any of them before.

“The members of a dozen families lay themselves down to sleep with not so much as a thin curtain separating their different births. The sons and daughters of different families cooped up in one small building like so many beasts is a condition of affairs that one can hardly believe, yet such is a fact, and they live peacefully together, never trespassing or intruding upon one another in any other manner.”

‘Two Trainloads of Bohemian Goat Islanders’

The Bohemian oyster shuckers on Goat Island continued to show up in the pages of the Tar Heel for another couple of years.

The very next year, for instance, on April 10, 1903, the Tar Heel referred to the Bohemians while railing against a change in state law that regulated the oyster industry more closely.

In that article, the Tar Heel warned Elizabeth City’s citizens that the new law would have a disastrous impact on the town’s economy.

The headline read:

 “The Oysterman’s Boats are Idle and without Employment. TWO BIG CANNERIES SUSPEND. Several Hundred Bohemians go Home—Colored Laborers are Walking the Streets—and the Oyster Tongers are out of Pocket Money.”

The Tar Heel observed that oyster cannery owners had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to “send a mass of Bohemian population from Maryland to North Carolina.”

The newspaper then went on to say that local merchants would suffer if the Bohemian oyster shuckers left the North Carolina coast for good:

“In Elizabeth City alone, an entire island colony have migrated to Baltimore this week, whose combined salaries were practically invested here and who might have gone this month into the pockets of our merchants.”

The “entire island colony” was of course a reference to the Bohemian oyster shuckers at Goat Island.

The paper continued:

“The Boyle Oyster Canning Company suspended active business Wednesday the 1^st. Monday April 6^th two train loads of Bohemian Goat Islanders, left Elizabeth City for Baltimore, where they will engage in picking strawberries, or canning sundry goods.”

That was actually typical. When the oyster season ended on the North Carolina coast, usually later in April, the Bohemian immigrants most often returned to Baltimore to work either in canneries there or in the fields of Maryland and Delaware that supplied the city’s canneries with fruits and vegetables.

The Song of the Oyster Shucker

According to newspaper accounts, the first Bohemian immigrants had come to work in Elizabeth City’s oyster industry in the latter part of 1890.

In a December 1890 issue of another Elizabeth City newspaper, the Weekly Economist, I found an article that noted:

“The oyster packing house of Wm. Taylor received 75 Bohemian laborers yesterday from Baltimore with their families…. There are about 25 women and 15 to 20 children.”

At that time, oyster canneries and shucking houses were springing up along the North Carolina coast, but no place more so than in Elizabeth City.

Two years later, the Weekly Economist Oct. 27, 1893, looked back wistfully at the prosperity and excitement that came to Elizabeth City during that first year or two of the state’s oyster boom.

Pondering all of Elizabeth City’s history, the newspaper’s editor declared that he could only compare the impact of the oyster boom on the town to the days after the opening of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1829.

Referring to the oyster boom, the newspaper observed:

“It was a jolly time—a new revelation. Population and money flowed in a perpetual stream and prosperity was felt in every fibre and pulsation of business.”

On one hand, he seemed anxious about the large influx of immigrants into what had been a relatively quiet southern town.

“New people, new faces, new ways, new manners, almost destroyed the homogeneity of the population,” he wrote.

On the other hand, the newspaper’s editor clearly found something intoxicating in that historical moment.

“The song of the oyster shucker was heard in the land, the refrain of its suggestive melody was joined by Bohemians, Hittites, Hivites, Jebezites, Virginians, Marylandros, and Afro-Americans, in happy harmony and peaceful intercourse.”

“Every Saturday night was a new and upward departure in business,” he exclaimed. “There was money and plenty of it in all hands.”

While the local oyster industry never again reached the heights it did in 1890-91,  Elizabeth City remained home to oyster canneries well into the first decade of the 20^th century, and Bohemian immigrants continued to make the journey from Baltimore to work in the town’s canneries.

The John Boyle & Co. cannery continued to employ Bohemian oyster shuckers at least until 1903. According to the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, “Bell’s oyster house” in Elizabeth City also employed “a large force of Bohemian oyster workers” in those first years of the 20th century.

Other oyster canneries in Elizabeth City likely employed Bohemian immigrants as well, but I have not found any record of them doing so.

Beaufort, Morehead City and Marshallberg

Another part of the North Carolina coast where “the song of the oyster shucker” could be heard was Beaufort, a small town in Carteret County where local people had always made their livings from the sea.

I found historical references to Bohemians working in Beaufort’s oyster canneries from 1890 to 1914.

In December 1890, for example, The Daily Journal in New Bern reported that a sizable group of Bohemian immigrants had passed through that coastal town on their way to a cannery in Beaufort.

A few weeks later, a second group passed through New Bern. According to The Daily Journal Jan. 15, 1891, they arrived on the steamer, Neuse, then took a train east to Morehead City, where they could board a ferry for Beaufort.

Surveying the Bohemians passing through New Bern, The Daily Journal’s correspondent wrote:

“There were in all about 100 people, about 75 of whom were workers, the remaining 25 being children too small for labor. They were especially Poles and Bohemians, but there were a few Germans among the number. They appear to be quiet, industrious people, who will make desirable citizens.”

Over the years, large numbers of Bohemian shuckers worked in oyster canneries both in Beaufort and in other parts of Carteret County.

For instance, a report in Washington Progress, Feb. 2, 1892, indicated that the North Carolina Packing Co. was employing Bohemians at its oyster cannery in Beaufort.

Six years later, The Daily Journal in New Bern on Dec. 15, 1898, reported that Bohemian oyster shuckers were working at the A.B. Riggin & Co.’s oyster cannery in Marshallberg, a village 8 miles east of Beaufort.

“The steamer Neuse brought in quite a passenger list yesterday, the large number being Bohemians of all ages, from infants in arms to grandmothers. The crowd were from Baltimore…. [and] were engaged by the Oyster Canning Factory at Marshalberg, and will shuck oysters at the factory. There were 48 persons in the party.”

That same month, a Raleigh newspaper, Carolinian, reported Dec. 22, 1898 that “fifty foreigners” were shucking oysters at the Booth Packing Company’s cannery in Morehead City.

Two years later, on Oct. 30, 1900, the New Berne Weekly Journal commented that “about 20 Bohemians” had passed through New Bern on their way to an oyster cannery in Beaufort.

 “They came from Baltimore and were men, women, and children,” the newspaper observed.

Polish Oyster Workers in Swansboro

At least for a time, in 1907 and 1908, Bohemian oyster shuckers were also working and living in Swansboro, an old seaport that is in Onslow County, just across the White Oak River from Carteret County.

In Swansboro, the immigrant laborers worked at a cannery owned by a local merchant named Guy D. Potter.

On Oct. 11, 1907, New Bern’s Daily Journal reported that Potter had gone to Baltimore to recruit “a hundred head of Poles as shuckers.”

Six months later, on March 31, 1908, an article in the New Bern Weekly Journal indicated that Potter employed the Poles not only to shuck oysters, but also to harvest the oysters.

We only know that was the case, unfortunately, because the newspaper reported that one of the Polish immigrants had a tragic accident while returning from the oystering grounds. According to the Weekly Journal, his sail skiff overturned and, unable to swim, he drowned.

The report did not give the Polish oysterman’s name. It did however say that he left a wife and four children in Swansboro.

At Thomas Duncan’s Cannery in Beaufort

The last reference that I found to Bohemian oyster shuckers in Carteret County was in the April 4, 1914, edition of the New Bern Sun Journal.

That article was brief. It indicated only that a Beaufort oyster cannery owner named Thomas Duncan had accompanied a large group of Bohemian immigrants back to Baltimore.

The Bohemians had worked for him that winter and were returning to Baltimore after finishing the oyster season in Beaufort.

The article gave no more details. However, I found it especially interesting because several photographs at the State Archives of North Carolina show interior scenes of Thomas Duncan’s oyster cannery in Beaufort.

One of those photographs, above, shows a group of women wearing dark hats and shawls in the oyster factory’s canning room.

Another photograph, at the top of the post, shows a long view of the cannery’s shucking room.

I cannot say for sure, but I strongly suspect that at least the first photograph, and probably the second, portray Bohemian immigrants, as well as, in the case of the second photograph, African Americans.

If that is correct, they may be our only surviving images of Bohemian oyster shuckers anywhere on the North Carolina coast.

‘Bohemian Headquarters’

Another, very different account of the Bohemian oyster shuckers on the North Carolina coast, comes from the Washington Gazette, a newspaper published in Washington.

On Nov. 6, 1890, at the height of the oyster boom, one of the Gazette’s writers described his visit to what he called Washington’s “Bohemian Headquarters.”

He was referring to an old school building on Third Street that had been converted into a migrant labor camp for the oyster season.

I do not know what the Gazette’s reporter expected to find at “Bohemian Headquarters.” Evidently it was not this:

“It was discovered that a fiddle and a banjo were employed in dispensing sweet music, while about two dozen gushing Bohemian maidens with pale-faced partners were tripping the regular old fandango in high glee.”

He must have gone there on a Saturday evening, after the oyster shuckers finished their shift at a local cannery.

The Gazette’s correspondent apparently enjoyed his visit. He observed that “both men and women seemed courteous and kind.”

He also mentioned in passing that he found some of the young women quite attractive, and he expressed some surprise at how many of the Bohemians were “conversing well in English.”

He then went on to describe their living quarters:

“There are 63 quartered in the building which crowds it to its uttermost capacity…. The only furniture noticed were trunks or chests with one or two bedsteads. The balance of the sleeping paraphernalia consists of bunks in a continuous row from one end of the room to the other. There were four or five stoves placed about the room….”

Most likely, that group of Bohemian immigrants was employed at the J.S. Farren & Co.’s oyster cannery that was located on the town’s waterfront, near what is now the Children’s Park.

Based in Baltimore, J.S. Farren & Co. had opened the cannery earlier that fall.

Another Baltimore firm, the H.J. McGrath Canning Co., also opened an oyster cannery in Washington that winter. However, its workers had not yet arrived from Baltimore at the time that the Gazette’s correspondent wrote his story.

According to another local newspaper, the Washington Progress on Jan. 13, 1891, 100 Bohemian oyster shuckers arrived in Washington a week or two after New Year’s to begin work at the McGrath cannery.

I do not know how many more years the Bohemians came to Washington. The last reference that I found to them in the town’s oyster industry was from the Washington Gazette on Feb 18, 1892.

Anti-immigrant Views

When he visited the “Bohemian Headquarters,” the Washington Gazette’s correspondent seemed to have been rather charmed by the oyster shuckers from Baltimore.

However, I found a much different sentiment expressed in the Gazette the next year.

At that time, an uncredited article on the Gazette’s front page had this to say about the Bohemian immigrants:

“The Bohemians are rapidly developing the innate cussedness of their true nature. They are a nuisance in the sections where they are located and the sooner Washington is rid of this very undesirable acquisition to her population the better pleased many of her citizens will be.”

Where that hostility was born, and why the Gazette’s view of the Bohemian oyster shuckers had changed so profoundly, is far from clear.

Had some incident occurred that colored town leaders’ attitudes toward the immigrants?

Or perhaps that comment reflected anti-immigrant or even anti-Catholic bias, both of which were on the rise in the U.S. at that time? Most of the Bohemians came from predominantly Catholic homelands.

Or had cannery owners courted trouble by employing immigrant laborers instead of hiring local workers?

Those are all possibilities, but I do not have anywhere near enough evidence to say more.

‘Now she now sleeps in quietude’

In that same year, 70 miles away, an even darker view of Washington’s Bohemian immigrants was expressed in the Perquimans Record, a newspaper published in the coastal town of Hertford.

 On March 18, 1891, the Record noted that a train carrying Washington’s Bohemian shuckers back to Baltimore at the end of the oyster season had passed through Hertford.

Referring to Washington, the newspaper’s correspondent wrote, “Our sister town has at last gotten clear of the dirty, ugly tribe, and now she sleeps in quietude.”

I do not know what stirred the Perquimans Record to that level of maliciousness, but clearly some local people greeted the Bohemian oyster shuckers warmly and others did not.

At the Pungo River and Swan Quarter

Bohemian immigrants also worked in oyster canneries in the more remote coastal communities east of Washington.

On Oct. 23, 1903, for instance, the Elizabeth City Tar Heel reported that  “two (train) carloads of Bohemians” were en route to Belhaven, 25 miles east of Washington.

Beginning in the late 19th century, hundreds of oyster shuckers — one government report said as many as a thousand — left their usual homes and created what amounted to a here-today, gone-tomorrow boom town of oystering people there on the banks of the Pungo River.

Another 25 miles east, Bohemians were also shucking oysters in Swan Quarter, a village bordered by seemingly endless plains of salt marsh on the edge of the Pamlico Sound.

I lived in Swan Quarter for a time when I was young, and I remember old-timers then telling stories about the Bohemian immigrants who used to come and shuck oysters there.

However, the only newspaper account I found that mentioned those immigrant laborers concerned a brawl that broke out between them and local oystermen in February 1902.

That story ran in several North Carolina newspapers, including the Kinston Free Press of Feb. 11, 1902:

“Some Bohemians, who are employed at the oyster canneries there, were having a dance, when the crews of several [oyster] dredges came ashore and attempted to take charge of the dance.”

The story continued:

“A general fight ensued, and when the smoke of the battle cleared away it was found that 13 people were wounded, seven of them seriously, four badly cut and three shot.”

Whether that incident was rooted in tensions between locals and immigrants or was just a run-of-the-mill dance hall fight — fights were almost a Saturday night ritual in some coastal villages — I do not know.

All I can say for sure is that if the fight had not made the news, I would not have found any written evidence of Bohemian oyster shuckers ever living and working in Swan Quarter.

By the Calabash River

The last incident involving Bohemian oyster shuckers that I want to mention comes from the quiet salt marsh creeks located below Shallotte, 50 miles southwest of Wilmington.

The exact location of the oyster cannery where the Bohemians worked there is somewhat uncertain, but as best I can tell it was 12 or 13 miles below Shallotte, in the vicinity of the Calabash River.

According to several articles that ran in the Wilmington Morning Star in December 1907, 60 Bohemians — actually Poles, by all accounts — were recruited in Baltimore and transported to the A. B. Riggin & Co.’s oyster cannery on that part of the North Carolina coast. Copies of the articles are in the Brunswick County Historical Society’s newsletter of April 2007.

Things must have been bad at the cannery. Only a few days after arriving there, half of the Polish workers gathered whatever possessions they had and left. According to a Dec. 1, 1907, account, they had found “the pay and conditions” at A.B. Riggin & Co. intolerable.

They did not have an easy time getting back to Baltimore. Some walked all the way to Wilmington. Others somehow got passage to Wilmington aboard a steamer called the Atlantic.

 According to the Wilmington Morning Star, the Poles spoke little or no English, and they seem to have been penniless. When they reached Wilmington, they had no place to stay, so town leaders let them bed down for a few nights first at the police station, then at City Hall.

Many stayed in Wilmington for a time and took temporary jobs at a local lumber mill. Others did farm work. A few chopped wood and did other odd jobs around the seaport.

As best I can tell, they probably worked just long enough to earn passage home to Baltimore.

Four or five other Poles got home by taking passage aboard “the leaking schooner Grace Seymour in exchange for manning the pumps on the voyage North,” a grueling job if ever there was one.

Remembering the Bohemian oyster shuckers

The history of these Bohemians immigrants — these Czechs, these Poles, these Slavs, Italians and others —  is remembered at least somewhat better in other parts of the American South.

To an important degree, that is because of a child labor investigation more than a century ago.

Between 1909 and 1916, a social reformer named Lewis Hine documented “Bohemian” and local children, both Black and white, in oyster and shrimp canneries in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and South Carolina.

Working for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine used his photographs and reports to advocate for stricter child labor laws across the U.S.

His photographs are powerful, and many, particularly those of the youngest workers, are unforgettable. They stunned many people when they first appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books.

Now preserved at the Library of Congress, Hine’s photographs and investigative reports highlighted child labor in the South’s oyster industry.

But they also brought public attention to the low wages, long hours, and often atrocious working conditions that shuckers of all ages, races, and backgrounds experienced in oyster factories at that time.

In the parts of the coastal South that he visited, Hine’s work assured that the Bohemian oyster shuckers, and really all who worked in oyster canneries, would be remembered.

Lewis Hine never visited the North Carolina coast, however.

Without his work to remind us of them, all memory of the Bohemian oyster shuckers — and really all those who worked in North Carolina’s oyster canneries — gradually faded away here, then was lost.

What I hope is that what I have written here today, however incomplete it is, might be the beginning of remembering them.

 *  *  *

For their help with the research for this story, I want to express my deep gratitude to Stephen Farrell at the George H. and Laura E. Brown Library in Washington, N.C.; Ray Midgett of the Historic Port of Washington Project; David Bennett at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort (especially for his work on A.B. Riggin & Co.); and to my old friend Amelia Dees-Killette at the Swansboro Area Heritage Center Museum. 

I also want to extend a special shoutout to my dear friend Bland Simpson for his lyrical evocation of Machele Island in “The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s Sound Country Chronicle,” one of my favorite books. 

If you want to learn more about the history of the state’s oyster industry, my essay “The Oyster Shucker’s Song.” might be helpful. And if you’d like to read more about the Bohemian immigrants in the South as a whole, I wrote a piece called “Shuckers and Peelers”  for Southern Exposure magazine many years ago that you might find interesting. 

I dedicate this story to the memory of one of my ancestors on the Polish side of my family, my great-uncle Peter, a lobsterman who lost his life at sea. 

The coastal historian Jack Dudley recently gave me copies of some wonderful historical photographs of Mashoes, a fishing village now almost gone, that sits on a remote and solitary hammock on the mainland of Dare County, just northwest of Roanoke Island.

For me they brought back memories. I first visited Mashoes 40 years ago, during a winter when I was living on the shores of Lake Mattamuskeet, on that same part of the North Carolina coast.

Even then, the Mashoes I saw was almost a ghost town. The fish houses had been abandoned. The old church was gone. The boatyards had grown quiet.

But there were still a few cottages there, and a few signs of life, including a gill net drying in a fisherman’s backyard, several garden plots, and two or three boats tied up at the docks.

Above all, I remember how beautiful Mashoes was, and its solitude, and how frail the little village looked, surrounded by broad waters and miles of salt marsh and pocosin thicket.

I wondered then what its story was. I longed to know how Mashoes had come to be there, and if it had ever had more life to it, and who had lived there, and what their lives been like.

When Jack showed me the photographs, my memories of that day all came back. And at that moment, I decided that I would try to see if I could learn more about Mashoes’ past.

–2–

As I looked into the history of Mashoes (pronounced “Mee-shoes”), I quickly discovered that there had been settlers on that remote point of land by the time of the Revolutionary War, if not before.

For instance, according to the Native Heritage Project, a genealogical effort to document Native Americans, a mariner named John Payne purchased 160 acres at Mashoes Creek in 1773.

By 1786, Payne was living there with his family and was holding 13 African Americans in slavery, most of whom, I assume, would have forced to labor as fishermen or in other maritime trades.

Land, tax, and census records gave me some sense of settlement along Mashoes Creek in the 1700s and 1800s, but I discovered that I could not really find descriptive portraits of Mashoes until the 20^th century.

Between 1930 and 1940, in particular, a flurry of newspaper accounts described visits to Mashoes. That sudden interest in the little village, I soon learned, was due to a local fisherman and storekeeper named Thomas Loyal Midgett, who in those years undertook what was largely a one-man campaign to persuade the state to build the first road to Mashoes.

Up to that time, Mashoes might as well have been an island. The waters of Albemarle Sound, Croatan Sound, and East Lake wrapped around the village, except to the south, where swamplands and salt marshes separated the village from the rest of mainland Dare County.

No road had ever crossed that swamp and marsh. All travel and trade to and from Mashoes had always been by boat.

Historically that had not been unusual on the mainland of Dare County. For instance, Stumpy Point, a fishing village 20 miles south of Mashoes, was at least as isolated as Mashoes until 1926, when the state completed a road that ran from Stumpy Point to Engelhard.

But by the 1930s, Mashoes was an outlier. By most accounts, Mashoes was the last village anywhere on the mainland of the North Carolina coast that was not accessible to automobiles.

Beginning about 1930, Thomas Loyal Midgett, Capt. Tom, most people called him, set out to change that. He traveled to Manteo, the county seat, and perhaps to Raleigh as well, to convince public officials to build a road to Mashoes.

He also began inviting newspaper reporters to Mashoes to build public support for the construction of a road.

Midgett was kind of Mashoes’ unofficial mayor, and he had been watching the village’s population decline sharply during the early years of the Great Depression.

Nearly all the village’s people were fishermen and their families. Yet during the Depression years, very few fishermen anywhere on the North Carolina coast could make a decent living — the number of commercial fishermen on public relief was staggering.

The Great Depression strangled fishing communities across the Outer Banks and along North Carolina’s sounds and bays.

With so many people unemployed, and with wages and farm prices plummeting, fewer Americans were buying fresh fish. At times, the state’s fishermen left fish to rot on the beach because seafood dealers could not find a market for them.

Some fishing communities proved more vulnerable to the economic downturn than others, however. The fate of any fishing village without a road — or without a railroad to northern markets, or a bridge to the mainland, if it was on an island — hung by a thread. Many of those communities did not survive the Great Depression.

Seeing what was happening, Tom Midgett hoped that a road across the swamplands would bring new life to Mashoes.

Fortunately for those of us interested in North Carolina’s coastal history, several journalists who were Capt. Midgett’s guests in Mashoes later published newspaper stories about the village, including what some of the old timers there told them about its history.

With the help of other sources in the collections of the Outer Banks History Center and the State Archives, those newspaper stories gave me at least a glimpse of what the village was like both in the 1930s and in earlier times, before anyone had ever dreamed of a road.

–3–

One of the most interesting newspaper articles on Mashoes was published in the Raleigh News & Observer on Nov. 27, 1938.

The author of the article was Ben Dixon MacNeill, a journalist who later wrote a well-known account of the Outer Banks called The Hatterasman and a novel, published posthumously, called Sand Roots.

In his N&O story, MacNeill described how he began his journey to Mashoes at Roanoke Island, where at that time he was the publicist for Paul Green’s new outdoor drama “The Lost Colony.”

A bridge had not yet been built between Roanoke Island and the mainland of Dare County, so he took a private ferry across Croatan Sound to Manns Harbor, a fishing village seven miles south of Mashoes. He then found a fisherman to take him up the coast to Mashoes.

In Mashoes, MacNeill found perhaps a dozen families living along what locals called “Peter Mashoes Creek.” (More on that name later.) A little arc of old fish houses stood on wood pilings around the village’s harbor. There was a church, a school, a post office, two abandoned stores.

He described seeing sheep grazing on the grassy cart road that ran from the docks up into the little settlement.

One of the first places that he visited was the village school, said to be the smallest in the state. The teacher, Carrie Mae Lowe, greeted him there. She had come to Mashoes from Rockingham, N.C., 250 miles away, to take the teaching job. She must have had an adventuresome spirit.

Ms. Lowe taught only seven students, though, she said, it was eight if you included Briary, sixth grader Boyd Basnight’s dog. She told Ben Dixon MacNeill that Briary accompanied Boyd to school every day.

“Now that she is used to local custom, [Miss Lowe] would never think of omitting Briary when she calls the roll,” MacNeill wrote. “He is now a member of the 6^th grade … and has a desk all to himself. He sits there and behaves himself. … Miss Lowe says he is a very smart pupil.”

While he was in Mashoes, MacNeill watched three young children arrive at the school by boat. Six-year-old Wilton Westcott was behind the oars, his two sisters enjoying the ride.

Ms. Lowe explained that the children lived on an isolated rise a mile down the creek and always came to school that way.

–4–

A personal story: my mother’s fourth grade teacher in Beaufort, N.C., was evidently cut from the same cloth as Ms. Lowe. A year before Ben Dixon MacNeill found Boyd Basnight’s puppy attending school in Mashoes, my mother’s German shepherd Mike-Dog was going to school with her.

My mother’s father David had died in a terrible accident in the fall of 1937. After his death, my mother’s teacher allowed my grandmother to send my mother to school with Mike-Dog.

Mike-Dog rested by my mother’s desk for the rest of that school year and was, my mother later told me, a tremendous comfort to a heartbroken little girl. And like Briary in Mashoes, he was, she said, always well behaved.

–5–

Huts of Rough Boards

In the April 4^th, 1930, edition of The Independent, a newspaper published in Elizabeth City, journalist Victor Meekins described a recent visit to Mashoes:

“Down on the creek about 150 yards from the Midgett store and home, is a scene of much activity these days. A hundred shad fishermen live in huts of rough boards … and make this their rendezvous for the season.”

He continued, “They get out at daylight, to their nets anchored, or tied to stakes in the rough waters of Albemarle Sound.”

–6–

On the day that he visited Mashoes, Ben Dixon MacNeill also visited the home and boatyard of William “Bill” Howett. Born nearby in 1864, Howett was just shy of 75 at that time, but he had been one of the foremost builders of traditional workboats on that part of the North Carolina coast for many years.

Howett was one of two master boatbuilders in Mashoes that built the elegant, sweet sailing wooden workboats known as “shad boats” in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

“He remains the premier boat builder of that country,” Ben Dixon MacNeill wrote his News & Observer article in 1938.

The other shad boat builder in Mashoes was Ken Mann, who apparently had a boatyard in the village for a time, but at another time had his boatyard on Rabbit Island, a marshy rise just off Mashoes that has washed away in the years since that time.

For more on shad boats and shad boat builders, see my 12-part series “The Story of Shad Boats.” 

That series features the research of the two most knowledgeable authorities I have ever known on the history of these distinctive traditional workboats– Mike Alford, the former curator of traditional workboats at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort, and Earl Willis, a now retired schoolteacher who grew up among the last generation of shad boat builders in Wanchese, N.C.

When Howett passed away a few years later, his obituary in the Dare County Times (Dec. 11, 1942) noted that fishermen had long come to Mashoes from great distances to have him build a boat built for them.

To some he seemed something of an eccentric, but I always take that kind of reputation with a grain of salt. In my experience, it often meant that an individual retained the values and outlook of an earlier age, and perhaps failed to embrace other people’s notions of progress and a modern life.

“For many, many years,” MacNeill wrote, “people have been going to Mashoes to get their boats built by this old man, nobody knows how old he is. When they look at the tools with which he does his work, they doubt that anyone could build a raft with them, but when they see the product finished in marvelous strength and smartness and beauty, they marvel at the genius and patience of the man.”

–7–

“To Get Away from the World”

On Nov. 19, 1939, a reporter from another newspaper, The News & Record, of Greensboro, N.C., also spoke with Peter Howett on a visit to Mashoes. In the interview, Howett told him he remembered when fishing boats from all over Dare County crowded the village’s little harbor.

“Why, I mind the time when more than 200 boats were tied up there at one time—and it was me that built most of them.”

Howett went on to say:

“They came from Manns Harbor and from Stumpy Point and from Roanoke Island and pitched their tents or built makeshift shacks down there by the beach during the fishing season. I was right there with them, too.”

According to the reporter, Howett’s elders had told him when he was young that Mashoes had originally been just a fish camp.

He meant the kind of place where people didn’t usually live, but where fishermen gathered only for the fishing season, lived rudely, cooking over fires, and no doubt sharing story, song, and more than a little bit of East Lake liquor, then went home.

Howett said that changed after the Civil War. “With the coming of peace,” the News & Record’s correspondent was told, “many of the men who had suffered during the war felt the need to get away from the world so a number of houses sprang up in Mashoes during the next few years.”

That image of Mashoes in that day stayed with me: a village built as a refuge for broken men and those weary of war and killing.

–8–

While in Mashoes in 1938, Ben Dixon MacNeill observed that an old wooden boat called the Hattie Creef bound the village to Elizabeth City and to other isolated fishing villages on that part of the North Carolina coast.

The Hattie Creef was a 55-foot-long vessel owned by the Globe Fish Company, a wholesale seafood dealer that two brothers in Wanchese, Ezekiel R. and Arthur S. Daniels, had founded in 1911.

George Washington Creef, who is best known for inventing the shad boat, built the Hattie Creef at his Manteo boatyard in or about 1888. He built her for oystering, but the Daniels turned her into a buy-boat sometime between 1911 and 1915.

In the late 1930s, when MacNeill was in Mashoes, the Hattie Creef arrived at the village’s docks every day during the fishing season. The boat’s hands unloaded ice for the next day’s catch, and they picked up that day’s catch, which would ultimately end up in Elizabeth City.

That was the site of the nearest railroad to Mashoes and to a host of other remote fishing villages on that part of the North Carolina coast. In Elizabeth City, the fish were loaded onto refrigerated cars and sent to Norfolk, Baltimore, and other markets to the north.

At that time, the fishing business in Mashoes could not have survived without the Hattie Creef. However, the old boat was important to the villagers in other ways, too. Most importantly, its captain was always happy to give a lift to local people bound anywhere on his route.

As a result, the Hattie Creek helped connect Mashoes to the rest of the world. From Mashoes, the village’s residents could take the Hattie Creef to buy provisions in Elizabeth City, to see a doctor in Manteo, or to visit a sister or a girlfriend in some of the other fishing villages that were on the boat’s regular run, such as Manns Harbor and Stumpy Point.

–9–

On March 27, 1896, The Weekly Economist in Elizabeth City reported that a large crowd of some 100 fishermen had moved into camps in Mashoes for the shad fishing season.

That same issue of The Weekly Economist noted that the “Davis’ seine fishery” in Mashoes was also busy.

That may be a reference to the Croatan Fishery, a massive undertaking that had been operating on the upper part of Croatan Sound since at least the early 1800s.

Owned by Col. William “Bill” Davis of Elizabeth City for much of the late 19^th century, the fishery was manned by large gangs of African American fishermen who harvested the fish in a heavy rope seine that was more than a mile long.

The size of their catches was mind boggling. The largest record of a catch at the Croatan Fishery that I found was a single haul of at least 450,000 fish, requiring two days of labor.

Several other historical accounts refer to that kind of seine fishery operating at Mashoes in the 19^th century. However, I cannot be sure that the Croatan Fishery and the “Davis’ seine fishery” were one and the same. Another seine fishery may also have operated in the vicinity of Mashoes in 1896.

One possibility, which I can’t rule out, but have no evidence for, is that Isaac N. Davis, a merchant in Wanchese, was behind the “Davis’ seine fishery.” Davis had been in the shad fishing business since the 1870s, and he may have had the financial wherewith necessary for a smaller, less capital intensive seine fishery.,

Either way, “the Davis’ seine fishery”— and its large number of presumably African American fishermen— was yet another contributor to Mashoes’ character in its heyday.

–10–

The origins of the Mashoes’ name are lost in mystery and lore. According to the North Carolina Gazetteer, some historians have suspected that the village’s name was of Algonquin origin, as are so many of the place names on that part of the North Carolina coast.

A more common legend, however, traces the village’s name to a man named Peter Michieux, or Mashows, about whom little is known.

According to legend, Peter Michieux, or Mashows, and his wife and child were shipwrecked near what became the site of Mashoes in the early 1700s. As the story goes, he washed ashore holding the lifeless bodies of his wife and child in his arms.

To quote the Gazetteer: 

“When he regained consciousness, he found both were dead. The shock of the experience shattered his reason, and 20 years later he sat with his back to a cypress tree and died. His skeleton and a board on which he had rudely carved the account of his tragic experience were discovered years later.”

People have told many other tales about the village’s name, but it is clear that the marshy stream that led into the settlement was called “Peter Mashoes Creek” by the 1770s.

–11–

Tom Midgett’s campaign to get a road to Mashoes was successful. A state contractor finished building the road in 1943. By then, the coming of the Second World War, with young people joining the military and new opportunities to work in shipyards and other defense industries, had thinned the village’s population even more.

But on a lovely summer day, perhaps 20 or 30 locals joined a larger crowd of visitors in Mashoes to celebrate the opening of the new road.

Speeches were made, and one and all enjoyed a dinner of fried spots, Cole slaw, and cornbread prepared by Bob Tillet, an African American man who was the longtime master of community fish fries on Roanoke Island, according to June 14, 1943, Greensboro News & Record.

Maybe Mashoes’ days were numbered anyway, but the coming of the road still seemed to change everything. The village’s remaining residents found the road to be a great convenience. On the other hand, they also discovered that the convenience came with a price.

The very next year, in September 1944, a powerful hurricane washed the Methodist church in Mashoes off its foundation. The church had long been the center of community life, but now that they had a road, the people of Mashoes found it was easier to drive down to Mt. Carmel Methodist Church in Manns Harbor than it was to make the repairs to their own church.

The Mashoes School must have closed around the same time. Once the road was built, Mashoes’ children could be driven to a school in Manns Harbor. The days of children arriving at school by rowboat had come to an end.

A few years later, the village’s post office closed its doors for the last time. According to a Dec. 14, 1950, article in the Rocky Mount Telegram, the very part-time postmaster there had only done $30 in business all year.

Rural post offices were being closed all over the state of North Carolina at that time. “Rural Free Delivery”– mail delivered by vehicles from post offices in towns — was replacing them.

On the other hand, the road made things a lot easier for the remaining residents of Mashoes in some other ways.

For instance, Tom Midgett’s general store had not sold anything besides sodas since the 1930s, so the road made it easier for people in Mashoes to get groceries and other provisions.

A few years later, the first bridges were built across the Croatan Sound (1957) and the Alligator River (1962). With the road built to Mashoes, local residents could drive for the first time to Manteo, Edenton, and Elizabeth City and beyond.

-12-

In his Nov. 19, 1939, interview with the Greensboro News & Record, the old boatbuilder Peter Howett seemed to foresee what the road would mean for the little village.

He seemed to know that he — and his way of life — was standing in the way of history, and he turned his back on all of it.

“Electric lights, running water, roads, roads — ain’t this place good enough for you like she is,” he told a local young woman, Celia Liverman, in a conversation with the reporter.

Howett had seen how the children who “got educated” on that part of the North Carolina coast left behind their fishing boats, and in many cases left behind their old homes, too, and often were seen no more.

In school, the children learned about the outside world, and even if they did not have the wherewithal in 1938 or ’39 to leave home and go in search of a different life, that would soon change.

“They tell me there are seven kids in school now, seven kids that ought to be out learning how to fish like their daddies before them,” Howett, ever the contrarian, preached. He sounded terribly cantankerous and old fashioned, but there was genuine feeling behind his words, too.

In fact, when I was younger, and my elders remembered Peter Howett’s days, and the changes the coast underwent in those years, I often heard similar words from many of those old timers, too.

I think that they, like Howett, were not really railing against everything new and modern. But I do think that they were trying to tell me something important: be mindful of what people call Progress, because there is a loss and gain in everything, and we often do not know what we have lost until it is gone.

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

I would like to share a collection of historical photographs from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

They were taken by inspectors and other personnel of the United States Lighthouse Board (1852-1910) and its successor agency, the United States Lighthouse Service (1910-1939), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Lighthouse Board, and then the Lighthouse Service, had the responsibility for building and maintaining lighthouses in the U.S., but also for placing and tending many other kinds of critically important navigational aids, including range lights, buoys, light beacons, daymarks and others.

Many of those different types of navigational aids can be seen in the selection of photographs that I am featuring here. They are all from the North Carolina coast, and they date to the years 1885-1917.

As you’ll see, they include some of the most iconic historical images of the state’s lighthouses.

However, for me the portraits of lighthouses are not the stars of the show. Even if it’s just because of their rarity and freshness, I was more drawn to many of the lesser-known photographs that I found in College Park.

In particular, I was excited to find so many photographs that highlight the historic use and importance of other, rather less majestic types of navigational aides. In some cases, I had rarely, if ever, seen them discussed in books and articles on North Carolina’s maritime history.

I am thinking, for instance, of the system of range lights that have guided vessels on the Cape Fear River since the early 19th century, or the far from glamorous lens lantern at Wreck Point, just off the point of Cape Lookout, that helped so many pilots find refuge from storms in the Cape’s lee.

Many of the photographs also give us a rare view of the behind-the-scenes work that was necessary to maintain a functional system of navigational aids on the North Carolina coast.

In this case, I am thinking, for example, of several photographs that I found in College Park of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s buoy depot that was in the port of Washington for more than half a century.

Or, as another example, I might refer you to the handful of photographs that I have included here that feature the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s gas works at Long Point Island on Currituck Sound. At that remote outpost, the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s keepers manufactured the compressed gas that was used in gas buoys over a large swath of the North Carolina coast.

Those photographs may not come with some of the romantic connotations that we so often associate with lighthouses. Yet for me at least, each of them opens a window into an important, unsung part of the state’s maritime history — and helps us to see and understand that coastal world a little bit better.

— 2 —

By most accounts, the history of navigation aids in the U.S. began with the construction of the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island in 1716.

Records of buoys and beacons in colonial America are notoriously sparse, though. According to Amy K. Marshall’s “A History of Buoys and Tenders,” there are records of cask buoys in the Delaware River in 1767 and of spar buoys in Boston Harbor as early as 1780, but not much else.

I suspect that there were at least some local buoys and beacons, and perhaps a great many, on North Carolina waters by that time as well, but the earliest I have found were wooden slats positioned to mark a channel on the Cape Fear River, below Wilmington, in the 1790s.

The framework for a more national system of navigational aids in the U.S. began to take shape around that same time. Soon after Independence, the First Congress passed an An act for the establishment and support of light-houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers that placed the responsibility for navigational aides under the authority of the Treasury Department.

Navigational aids continued to have a largely local character, and often differed widely from place to place, however, until 1848, when the U.S. Congress adopted a system of buoyage with uniform shapes, colors, and numbering — the so-called Lateral System, that, with some minor modifications, is still in use today.

— 3 —

Croatan Lighthouse in the channel between Croatan Sound and Albemarle Sound in 1914.

At that time, the Croatan Light was one of 14 manned lighthouses built on piles on North Carolina waters. The Wade Point, North River, Laurel Point, and Roanoke River lighthouses all stood on the Albemarle Sound or at the mouth of its tributaries.

The Long Shoal, Hatteras Inlet, Bluff Shoal, Gull Shoal, Brant Island, Southwest Point Royal Shoal, and Pamlico Point lighthouses were all located on Pamlico Sound.

The Croatan Lighthouse was northwest of Roanoke Island. Another lighthouse, the Harbor Island Light, was located at the entrance to Core Sound, not far from Portsmouth Island, and the Neuse River Lighthouse stood off Piney Point at the entrance to the Neuse River. According to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, the Croatan Lighthouse had a 4th Order Fresnel Lens, as well as a fog bell that struck every 15 seconds when in use. 

— 4 —

This might be my favorite photograph of a U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aid on the North Carolina coast. It’s a rather jerry-built back range light situated in a tree in downtown Edenton.

A front range light is evidently somewhere out in Edenton Harbor.

The front and back range lights worked together. When aligned visually, one directly behind the other, range lights indicated the route of safe passage on a river or other body of water. In this case, Edenton Harbor.

To be seen properly, the back range light had to be at least somewhat elevated above the front light, which in this case was achieved with nature’s help.

— 5 —

Debbie Mollycheck, who is the authority on the history of the Cape Fear river lights, recently told me that this photograph was probably taken during the Palmetto’s first inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear.

The Palmetto had just recently been commissioned a shallow water tender. Ms. Mollycheck also informed me that the gentleman with his hands on his hips was the Palmetto’s master, Emil F. Redell. A family attorney by trade, Ms. Mollycheck is the granddaughter of Franto Mollycheck II, a later keeper of the Cape Fear river lights.

She has done extensive research on the river’s light keepers and is currently writing a history of those keepers and of the 6th Lighthouse District as a whole. You can learn more about her work online.

— 6 —

According to Debbie Mollycheck, Berry was an African American waterman who was born into slavery in Brunswick County in 1855. Her research has shown that Berry had been tending lights on the Lower Cape Fear since 1885.

At the time of this photograph, he had the day-in and day-out responsibility for maintaining the lights along a 14-mile section of the river from Upper Lilliput Channel to the Atlantic. This photograph was taken on the same inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear that I referenced in the photograph above.

Keeper Berry was presumably guiding Capt. Redell and the Palmetto’s crew on the tour, with his boat being towed by the Palmetto and used when they needed to reach navigational aids on sections of the river too shallow for the Palmetto. You can learn more about Ms. Mollycheck’s research here, and I am hoping that I will be able to share more of her research on Henry Berry here sometime soon.

— 7 —

This is a rare portrait of the U.S. Lighthouse Service buoy depot in Washington March 1914. The depot was one of three or four in the Life-Saving Service’s 5th District, which extended from the Delaware coast to New Inlet, on the central part of the North Carolina coast.

At this site, personnel stored and maintained — painted, rebuilt, sometimes assembled — the buoys and beacons that were used throughout much of the North Carolina coast.

The depot was just below the town’s bridge across the Pamlico River, where its wharf was a popular, if apparently illicit swim spot for local kids. On the righthand side of this photograph, we can see the depot keeper’s house. In 1914, the keeper was Capt. T. F. Smith, a Life-Saving Service veteran who had previously been keeper of the Cape Hatteras Light for 19 years and the Ocracoke Light for 12 years. On the left, a side wheel steamer is docked on the Pamlico.

I can’t be sure — no Life-Saving Service tender was ever based at the depot — but the steamer looks a lot like the Sidewheel Lighthouse Tender Jessamine.

— 8 —

The U.S. Life-Saving Service used several different kinds of buoys to mark the locations of channels to warn of shoals and other dangers, and, in some cases, to indicate anchorage grounds.

Built of iron or steel plates and weighing anywhere from 700 to over 8,000 pounds, buoys such as these were moored to the bottom by a heavy chain attached to a concrete block, stone or cast-iron sinker. A cast-iron ballast ball, tethered directly below the buoy, kept them steady in rough seas and high winds.

Pilots could navigate in and out of a harbor, up or down a river or through another other kind of channel by eyeing the colors, numbers, and shapes of the buoys.

The maintenance and replacement of buoys was one of the U.S. Lifesaving Board and U.S. Lighthouse Service’s most important jobs, and a never-ending one.

As the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s annual report for 1915 said, “buoys are liable to be carried away, dragged, capsized, or sunk, as a result of ice or storm action, collision, and other accidents…, [but] great effort is made … to maintain them on station in an efficient condition, which frequently requires strenuous and hazardous exertions on the part of the vessels charged with this duty.” 

— 9 —

Another view of what I believe is the U.S. Lighthouse Service paddlewheel tender Jessamine tied up at the buoy depot in Washington, March 1914.

Built at the Malster & Reaney shipyard in Baltimore in 1881, the Jessamine was based at the 5th Lighthouse District’s headquarters in Baltimore but her crew built and maintained lighthouses and tended buoys and other navigational aides across much of the North Carolina coast.

Like all U.S. Lighthouse Service tenders, Jessamine was a tough, seaworthy vessel, constructed with a hull, deck framing, and the rest of her superstructure having “a large reserve of strength,” to quote a 1915 U.S. Lighthouse Service report.

Lighthouse tenders had to be capable of handling violent storms on the open ocean, as well as to navigate along shoals where shallow draft and a solid hull, capable of putting up with accidental groundings, was required.

Note the Jessamine’s forward mast, which doubled as a derrick for construction work and for hoisting and lowering buoys. The Jessamine was not, by the way, the only U.S. Lighthouse Service tender with a botanical name.

Since 1867, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had named its lighthouse tenders after trees, flowers, or other plants, generally ones native to the area where a tender operated.

— 10 —

In June 1900, crews from the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s predecessor agency, the U.S. Lighthouse Board, placed lens lantern at Wreck Point to help guide vessels seeking a lee inside Cape Lookout.

Erected at the barb at the point of Cape Lookout Bight, the light was a welcome sight for many a mariner caught offshore in heavy weather. The Wreck Point Light gives some sense of the diversity of navigational aides built and maintained by the U.S. Lighthouse Board and the U.S. Lighthouse Service.

According to The United States Lighthouse Survey for the year 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had 14,554 navigational aides in commission in U.S. waters as of that year. They included lighthouses, so-called “minor lights” that are not tended by resident keepers, light vessels, gas buoys, float lights, and a wide variety of unlighted aids such as bell and whistle buoys, fog signals, and day beacons.

— 11 —

The beacon in this photograph was a temporary replacement for a slatted, 3-pile structure that was crushed by ice in the great freeze of December 1917 to January 1918.

That cold spell devastated both U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aids and a great deal of maritime infrastructure. The ice cut away wharves and piers, took out beacons, and severely damaged at least two lighthouses. The North River Lighthouse was washed off its foundation after ice shattered its pilings. A buildup of ice also knocked askew the Norfolk & Southern’s railroad bridge across the Albemarle Sound.

According to the Jan. 25, 1918, Daily Advance in Elizabeth City, the weight of the ice made the bridge “as crooked as a snake” and a 1,000-plus foot section of the track fell into the Albemarle. Boats of all kinds were frozen in the ice; some, like the U.S. Coast Survey’s Matchless, were sunk. With no freight boats running, mail and other supplies did not reach Roanoke Island and a large section of the Outer Banks for three to four weeks.

When the ice finally broke up, U.S. Lighthouse Service crews had their hands full replacing and repairing buoys, beacons, and other navigational aids. A freeze that bad was unusual, but losing navigational aids to storms was not and kept the U.S. Lighthouse Service busy. Only a few years earlier, for instance, a 1913 hurricane destroyed 20 post lights on Pamlico and Albemarle Sound, washed out many government wharves and outbuildings, and did serious damage both to the buoy station in Washington, and to nine light stations from Ocracoke Island to Pamlico Point, according to the Washington Progress, Oct. 13, 1913.

— 12 —

The Wade Point Light Station at the mouth of the Pasquotank River was another lighthouse damaged in the great freeze of 1917-18. A screw-pile structure, the light was originally built in 1855 but was rebuilt at least once and maybe twice after Confederate guerrillas burned the superstructure during the Civil War.

It was rebuilt again in the 1890s. The station’s light and 26 x 26 cottage rested on five metal pilings roughly 12 feet above the water. During the freeze, a buildup of ice pushed the pilings to one side and left the superstructure in danger until repairs could be made to stabilize the foundation.

— 13 —

— 14 —

–15–

This is a view looking down from the U.S. Lighthouse Service tender Jessamine at the gas plant that was located at the Long Point Light Station, March 1893. Established in 1879, the station ran the gas plant in order to make the compressed gas that was used to light buoys throughout that part of the North Carolina coast.

At that time, the technology was still quite new. The country’s first gas buoy had only been deployed 12 years earlier, in 1881 at the entrance to New York Bay. Gaslit buoys were the wave of the future however. By 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had more than 500 gas buoys in operation.

By then, all of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s lighted buoys utilized compressed gas, either oil gas or acetylene. U.S. Lighthouse Service personnel deployed the gas buoys widely to mark the the entrances of rivers, inlets, and canals, as well as to signal shoals, jetties, and other dangers, as well as the paths of channels.

— 16 —

The brick building on the right is the Long Point Light Station’s retort house, where special equipment distilled and compressed the oil gas that was used in the region’s U.S. Lighthouse Board light buoys. On the left, we can see one of the two brick cisterns that were used for storing the gas. The rest of the gas works is in the background. According to research by Currituck Sound teacher and historian (and my friend) Barbara Snowden, the resulting gas was what was typically called at the time “Pintsch gas.”

Named after its inventor, a German tinsmith and manufacturer named Carl Friedrich Julius Pintsch, it was a compressed fuel gas created from distilled naphtha. Pintsch’s firm pioneered its use in buoys in the 1870s, and the U.S. Lighthouse Service used the gas extensively in buoys and other lighted navigational aides through the First World War, when it was largely replaced by acetylene.

Widely used in railroad cars as well, “Pintsch gas” could often light a buoy for a couple months or longer without refilling.

— 17 —

Originally built in 1817, the lighthouse was long a welcome sight to mariners at the entrance to the Cape Fear River. In July 1834, Capt. Henry D. Hunter of the revenue cutter Tanker described the Light as having 15 lamps, being 109 feet above the level of the sea, and showing a fixed light.

On an inspection tour two years later, he reported, “The keeper is an old Revolutionary [War] soldier and is unable from sickness to give the lighthouse his constant personal attention. The light, however, shows well from a distance,” according to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.

— 18 —

The Keeper’s House at the Ocracoke Light Station, May 1893. You can’t see it in this photograph, but the Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823, is just a few feet to the north.

I would expect that the three individuals in the photo are the light station’s keeper at that time, Enoch Ellis Howard, his wife Cordelia, and one of their daughters or granddaughters. According to Ellen Cloud’s book, “Ocracoke Lighthouse,” Enoch Ellis Howard was born on Ocracoke in 1833, became keeper of the light during the Civil War, and died while still serving as the Light Station’s keeper in 1897.

He was one of many Ocracoke Howards who made their livings following the sea one way or the other as ship’s pilots, mariners, coast guardsmen, and in other maritime trades, including, some say, one who was a member of Blackbeard’s crew in the early 1700s. 

Phillip Howard’s Village Craftsmen Journal is a wonderful place to learn more about the history of the Howard family on Ocracoke, as well as much else about the island’s history.

— 19 —

As I mentioned earlier, range lights are a pair of lit beacons placed some distance from one another, with the back light elevated higher than the front light. By lining up the two beacons, ship pilots could identify the channel that would afford safe passage through shallow or dangerous waters. They are sometimes used to fix position as well.

— 21 —

In addition to lighted navigational aids, the U.S. Lighthouse Service also built and maintained thousands of navigational aids that were not lighted– so-called “daymarks” that were only meant to be visible from sunrise to sunset. This 32-foot high structure, for instance, helped pilots get their bearings at the Little River Inlet, roughly 50 miles south of Wilmington.

— 22 —

Cape Lookout Light Station, 1889. I don’t know if I’ve seen a photograph that better captures the austere beauty of the Cape in that day and time. The building on the far right is the original Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1812 and apparently abandoned by this point in time. On both sides of the lighthouse’s base, we can just glimpse the two chimneys of the second Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1873. The two outbuildings to the right of the lighthouse are an oil house and perhaps a coal shed or other storage building.

— 23 —

These are the ruins of the keeper’s dwelling at the Price’s Creek Light Station on the Cape Fear River, just upriver of Southport, June 1917. Built in 1849, the brick dwelling had a wooden lantern that served as one of the range lights that guided vessels through the river’s ship channel.

This structure has since been destroyed by storms, but the ruins of the second range light at Price Creek, a squat 20-foot high brick tower, have survived and can be easily seen from the Southport-Fort Fisher Ferry.

— 24 —

–end–

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who shares on his website essays and lectures about the state’s coast. He brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives where he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

A few days ago, I gave the keynote address at an extraordinary event held in Plymouth to commemorate the Plymouth Massacre of April 1864. I found the event deeply moving, and I was honored to be there. This is a copy of my remarks.

Thank you for the invitation to say a few words here today. I will do my best not to go on too long, but I do feel as if some things need to be said. I of course will talk about the Plymouth Massacre. But I also want to talk at least briefly about the larger struggle for freedom, and to end slavery, that occurred here in Washington County and across the North Carolina coast during the Civil War.

I think that taking that somewhat broader view will help us to understand better what happened here in Plymouth and will help us to remember, mourn, and honor more fully those who lost their lives here 160 years ago.

In a way, I feel as if this is the funeral, the memorial service, that the victims of the massacre never had. They were unburied, left, by all accounts, where they fell, many of them in swamps where children would find their remains in the following days and weeks. No gravestones marked their passing. No monument has ever been raised to remember them.

We are here, then, to do what should have been done a long time ago. We are here to say words that for too long have not been spoken. We are here to lift prayers that are long overdue.

We are here to make sure that the forgotten will be remembered.

If you will bear with me, I will begin by setting the scene for what happened here in Plymouth.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Plymouth was a small town, quite a bit smaller than it is today. Most of the town’s population was African American, and the large majority of those Black men, women, and children were being held in slavery.

On the outskirts of Plymouth, on the Roanoke River, at Lake Phelps, and here and yon in every direction, thousands of African Americans were being held captive on plantations — slave labor camps, I think we would call them today, a kind of gulag of their time.

As we all know, by the time that the Civil War began in April 1861, white Southerners —and much of the North — had been treating African Americans as property, not as human beings, for more than two centuries. People, including little children, were bought and sold like mules.

That world — that way of life — finally began to crumble here in Washington County in the early part of 1862.

Very early in the Civil War, Union forces captured a long sliver of the North Carolina coast. Even before the first Yankee soldier stepped ashore, enslaved African Americans began to escape from plantations across Eastern North Carolina and move toward the sea.

Hundreds, then thousands, of African American men, women, and children fled from bondage in Confederate territory to freedom in New Bern, Beaufort, Washington, Roanoke Island—and Plymouth. As the Union force’s commanding general said, those communities were “overrun with fugitives from the surrounding towns and plantations.”

A great boatlift to freedom had begun. Across the sound here, on the Chowan River, slaves sailed away while their master shot at them from shore. Another night, a slave woman named Juno gathered her children into a dugout canoe and paddled down the Neuse River to freedom. A little east of here, at Columbia, a large group of African Americans confiscated a schooner and sailed down the Scuppernong and across the Albemarle Sound.

A little to our west, a Black boatman known as “Big Bob” carried 16 slaves down the Tar River to freedom, then turned and went back upriver for more.

Here in Plymouth, a group of slaves “patched until their patches themselves were rags” escaped and sailed through stormy weather and rough seas all the way to Roanoke Island. “How they succeeded is a wonder to us all,” a Yankee soldier exclaimed.

A little southeast of here, in Hyde County, an overseer informed a plantation’s owner that he could no longer control the enslaved men and women on the plantation, no matter what he did. Some had already escaped to Union lines. He said that he had even shot “old Pompey.”

Ten days later, that overseer reported that “something like 100 [slaves had] gone off in the last month,” 35 in a single night.

 “Almost every day negroes are shot … for attempting to run away,” a journalist in Goldsboro reported. One plantation owner, William Loftin, described the situation in letters to his mother. Even before Yankee troops reached Roanoke Island, he wrote that “a good many negroes are running away” and “all of mine are gone from the oldest to the youngest.”

“All that I ever had is gone,” Loftin wrote. Later, in 1863, reality really set in. “My boy Tony came up with the Yankees in full uniform saying he was a U.S. soldier…. He went to J. H. Bryan’s and took his gun away from him. He says he has killed four damned rebels…. He had a rifle strapped to his back.”

William Loftin’s ”boy Tony” was only the beginning. By the spring of 1864, thousands of African Americans on the North Carolina coast had joined the Union army. By war’s end, nearly 180,000 African American men had served or were serving in the Union army. (Forty thousand of them did not survive the war.) Another 19,000 served in the Union navy.

The Civil War here in Plymouth was not much like the one that you or I read about in our history books when we were young (especially if you are my age) or that you may have seen in movies such as “Gone With the Wind” or even in more recent documentaries such as Ken Burns’ “Civil War.”

The large majority of Washington County’s people were opposed to the Confederacy. Half the population, we have to remember, was African American, and large numbers of the county’s white citizens also supported the Union. In fact, in Washington County, roughly as many white men enlisted in the Union army as enlisted in the Confederate army.

The divisions among the county’s white people were deep and bitter. To quote one leading historian, here in Washington County, “Brother fought brother. Neighbor attacked neighbor.”

Prior to the Battle of Plymouth, the low point was probably in December 1862, when, in a quick in-and-out raid, Confederate troops burned most of the town.  (By that time, Plymouth had been in Union hands for months. Town leaders had peacefully handed the town over to the Union army in May 1862.)  According to a local planter, the Rebel troops burned the town to “prevent its affording shelter to the Abolitionists and run away [sic] negroes …”

By that time, a Union private reported, Plymouth had become “a general rendezvous for fugitive slaves.” They escaped from plantations far up the Roanoke, and many got their first taste of freedom on the ground where we stand.

Many of those Black men enlisted in the Union Army. For the first time, many Black families were also able to send their children to schools that had been started here so that they could learn to read and write and do arithmetic. (None of the Confederate states allowed Black children to go to school.)

By the spring of 1864, Plymouth had been held by Union troops for nearly two years. But on April 17th, some 7,000 Rebel troops under Major Gen. Robert F. Hoke lay siege to the town, hoping to take it back from the Union and make it once again part of the slave South.

Every Black man here, both those in uniform and those that were civilians, including many fugitive slaves, understood the danger. If Plymouth fell, they could expect at the very least to be re-enslaved. But by that point in the war, most African Americans understood that, if rebel troops captured them in battle, or found them wounded on the battlefield, they might well be murdered.

By the spring of 1864, relatively well-known Confederate massacres of Black Union soldiers had occurred at Fort Pillow, Tennessee; Fort Wagner, South Carolina; Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana; Poison Springs, Arkansas; and at Saltville, the Crater, and Suffolk, Virginia.

But there were others. Many killings of Black Union prisoners did not make even a ripple in the news. Memory of them was lost in the fog of war, the slowness with which news traveled, and the reluctance, even in the North, to take the accounts of Black witnesses at face value.

The Battle of Olustee was one of those. Early in 1864, reports of a massacre of wounded Black soldiers from the 35^th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, after an especially bloody battle in Olustee, Florida, reached New Bern. (The 35^th had been recruited in and around New Bern.)

After Olustee, Union leaders had grown suspicious because the Confederate commander supplied them with such a short list of Union soldiers wounded or taken prisoner in the battle. But not for some months did they conclude what the surviving Black soldiers had always known, that “most of the wounded colored men were murdered in the field.”

I do not know if the Black men and women here in Plymouth knew that Confederate general Robert Ransom’s soldiers were among the Rebel troops attacking Union positions here in Plymouth. But if they did know, they would have expected the worst. Ransom’s Brigade was one of those Confederate units notorious for not taking Black prisoners alive.

Ransom’s own men wrote about that policy. Only a month earlier, Ransom’s Brigade had taken no prisoners after encountering Black troops of the 2^nd Regiment, United States Colored Calvary, 75 miles from here, at Suffolk, Virginia. “Ransom’s Brigade never takes any negro prisoners,” one of Ransom’s soldiers bragged in a letter to the Charlotte Observer.

Another of Ransom’s soldiers, Pvt. Gabriel Sherrill, echoed those words. In a letter home a few weeks before the Battle of Plymouth, he wrote, referring to Black soldiers, “They will fite,” rather than surrender, “for they know that it is deth eny way if we got hold of them for wee have no quarters for a negroe.”

One of Ransom’s officers, Maj. John W. Graham, said much the same in a letter to his father. (Graham’s father represented North Carolina in the Confederacy’s senate.) In that letter, Maj. Graham said, speaking of Suffolk, the “ladies … were standing at their doors, some waving handkerchiefs, some crying, some praying, and others calling to us to `kill the negroes.’”

He told his father, “Our brigade did not need this to make them give `no quarter,’ as it is understood amongst us that we take no Negro prisoners.”

After a very bloody, four-day siege — one hard on both sides, but with especially heavy Confederate casualties — Hoke’s forces did capture the town of Plymouth on April 20^th, 1864. At that point, Rebel troops were left to ransack the town and the worst fears of the Black people and the white Unionists in the town were realized.

One of the first historians to write about the Plymouth Massacre in any detail was Dr. Wayne Durrill. Durrill earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of North Carolina in 1987, and he is now a professor at the University of Cincinnati. His book “War of Another Kind“ is the fullest scholarly study of the Civil War here in Washington County.

In his book, Professor Durrill quotes the only known account of the Battle of Plymouth given by an African American eyewitness, a man who identified himself as a Union sergeant. “Upon the capture of Plymouth by the rebel forces, all the negroes found in blue uniform, or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him, was killed,” he testified.

The Black eyewitness also observed that “some [were] taken into the woods and hung … Others I saw stripped of all their clothing and then stood upon the bank of the river with the faces riverward, and there they were shot … Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt-end of the muskets in the hands of the rebels.”

Professor Durrill quotes another Union serviceman, a white lieutenant named Alonzo Cooper, of the 12^th New York Volunteers, who reported that “the negro soldiers who had surrendered, were drawn up in line at the breastwork, and shot down as they stood.”

According to another eyewitness, when an unknown number of Black men, probably Union enlistees, saw what was happening and fired at Confederate troops, the Confederates “charged them with every conceivable weapon in their possession, whereupon the negroes [most of whom were unarmed] ran, taking refuge in Coneby Creek swamp and the flats beyond, scarcely a mile away.”

According to that account, the Rebels followed them into the swamp and “slaughtered” them “like rats.” Lt. Cooper, recalled, “the crack, crack of muskets down in the swamp where the negroes had fled to escape capture,” and reported that the Blacks were “hunted like squirrels or rabbits.”

Years later, B. D. Latham, who was a 12-year-old boy at the time, remembered that he and some other local white boys went into the swamp the Sunday morning after the battle. Professor Durrill wrote: “There they saw `hundreds of slain negro troops,’ their bodies having been left to decay for four days.”

Soon after Professor Durrill’s book was published, two highly respected Civil War historians, Weymouth T. Jordan and Gerald W. Thomas, undertook a far more exhaustive and in-depth study of the Battle of Plymouth’s aftermath. Deeply knowledgeable of the Civil War, both had, and have, reputations for being conservative, judicious, and diligent scholars.

Their goal was first to determine if what happened in Plymouth should truly be called a “massacre” and — if a massacre did occur here — how many people were killed.

At the time of their study, Jordan was the head of the Civil War Roster Project at the N.C. Division of Archives and History. Thomas, a native of Bertie County, had nearly finished his book “Divided Allegiances: Bertie County during the Civil War,” but took a break to assist Jordan to get to the bottom of what happened in Plymouth.

Together they sifted through thousands of pages of historical evidence. They then presented their results in a 72-page article called “Massacre at Plymouth:  April 20, 1864.” That article was published in the North Carolina Historical Review, the state’s foremost historical journal, in the spring of 1995. To this day, it remains the definitive study of what happened here in Plymouth.

Theirs was a very cautious approach. They did not accept evidence that could not be corroborated, and they looked askance at evidence if the individual that was the source of that evidence had any reason to exaggerate or be dismissive of claims of a massacre.

At times, when I reviewed their research, I personally felt that they may have been too cautious and leant over backwards too far for the sake of wanting their research to be utterly beyond reproach.

In their article, Jordan and Thomas acknowledged that we will probably never know every detail of what happened here on those April days in 1864, or know the exact number of people that lost their lives here. Yet their findings were unambiguous. In their conclusion, they wrote, “it is clear that blacks and Buffaloes [white Unionists] were killed at Plymouth under circumstances that merit the appellation `massacre’….”

They concluded that Confederate troops, mainly Ransom’s Brigade and cavalrymen led by Col. James Dearing, executed approximately 25 Black prisoners in the first days after the Battle of Plymouth. “Some blacks captured in uniform were shot out of hand…. [S]ome were dispatched later, [and] some black male civilians were murdered also….”

They went on to say: “The number of blacks, uniformed and otherwise, who were murdered in Plymouth on April 20 was probably no more than 10. Fifteen more may have been executed on April 23 or 24…. Forty were killed as they fled the battlefield, [and] 40 were hunted down and dispatched in the swamps.” Others died in combat, hundreds of others managed to escape, and “approximately 400, including a few uniformed soldiers and many women and children, were captured and taken prisoner.”

At least a handful of “Buffaloes” — the white Unionists — were also killed either in town or in the swamps.

To me one of the war’s most remarkable phenomenon was the courage and determination that African Americans soldiers and sailors displayed even though they knew that this kind of treatment could well be their fate whenever, and wherever, they fell into Rebel hands.

“We have fought … where captivity meant cool murder on the field, by fire, sword, and halter; and yet no black man ever flinched,” African American delegates — including North Carolina’s Abraham Galloway — declared at a convention of African American leaders in 1864.

Here in Plymouth, as well as on distant battlefields, America’s Black soldiers held onto a prophetic vision of the Civil War that in their eyes justified their hardships and sacrifices.

We have to remember: their courage, and their willingness to fight and die, was rooted in something bigger than themselves and far more personal than the Union cause. Their Civil War — the slaves’ Civil War — was grounded in the love of their wives and children, their brothers and sisters, their mothers and grandmothers, their yet-to-be-born grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom, if they prevailed, would be free.

If they prevailed, they knew, a child of theirs might one day go to school. A son might not be whipped to his last breath. A daughter could be raised in safety. Husbands and wives would know that they could grow old together.

If they prevailed, the unspeakable fear that a child could be taken away from them at any age, and at any moment, of any day, would disappear forever. A man or woman’s work would be their own.

A Black Union sergeant named Charles Brown expressed the prevailing sentiment among the country’s Black soldiers as well as anyone in the ranks.

While encamped near New Bern, Sgt. Brown weighed the dangers that his company faced from Confederate soldiers, as well as the discrimination that his men faced within the Union army due to their race.

And yet he wrote: “I feel more inclined daily, to press the army on further and further; and, let my opposition be in life what it will, I do firmly vow that I will fight as long as a star can be seen, and if it should be my lot to be cut down in battle, I do believe… that my soul will be forever at rest.”

As his regiment marched into battle, Brown said, they sang:

We are the gallant first 
Who slightly have been tried, 
Who ordered to a battle, 
Take Jesus for our guide.

May all of their souls forever be at rest. May they all be remembered. May we all find hope in the stars as they did.

Note: Photographer Sharon C. Bryant is the African American Outreach Coordinator at Tryon Palace in New Bern, and she prepared extensive educational materials on the history of the 35th USCT that were displayed at the encampment in Plymouth.

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. He shares on his website the essays and lectures that he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I recently asked my friend Tom Earnhardt if he would share some of his wonderful photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Green Swamp Preserve with me.

I think I just wanted to dwell a bit on one of the beautiful wild places that I hope to visit when this cold weather is gone and spring is here and the wildflowers begin to bloom again.

The Green Swamp Preserve is made up of 17,000 acres of largely pocosin and pine savanna in Brunswick County and Columbus County, just to the west, in the southern most corner of the North Carolina coast.

A gentleman tried and true, Tom not only sent me the photographs, but kindly gave me his permission to share them.

As I’m sure you know, Tom was for many years the creator and host of “Exploring North Carolina,” WUNC-TV’s very popular weekly television show featuring the glories of our state’s natural heritage.

Over the last half century, Tom has been one of North Carolina’s most dedicated conservationists. Day in and day out, he has devoted himself to protecting our wild places and to deepening our appreciation for them. And as you can see here, he is also a very talented photographer.

I’ve gone here and yon with Tom, but I have never had the chance to go to the Green Swamp Preserve with him.

However, I have long known that he has a special passion for the place. Located in the swampy low country of southeastern North Carolina, the preserve is made up of pocosin swamps and longleaf pine savannas that are a precious remnant of an ecosystem that once stretched across hundreds of square miles.

Biologists and nature lovers are especially drawn to the Green Swamp Preserve for the abundance and rich diversity of its carnivorous plants and for its wild orchids and other wildflowers, all of which are incredibly beautiful and some of which are quite rare.

“If the The Nature Conservancy had never done anything else, it would have proven its worth just with the Green Swamp Preserve,” Tom once told me. “That’s how important I think it is to preserving North Carolina’s natural heritage.”

The only time that I’ve been to the preserve was more than 25 years ago now. At the time, I was doing historical research for my book “The Waterman’s Song” and I just wanted to get a better feeling for the land on which the people I was writing about lived.

What I remember most from that visit are the things that I could never have discovered in old books and manuscripts: the smell of the longleaf pine savannas, the music of the birds and insects, the quality of the light, the feeling of the earth beneath my feet.

I still remember walking across the sphagnum moss, it being so spongy that it made the ground itself feel alive.

Earth, but also sea, or so it felt.

For me the Green Swamp Preserve is an otherworldly place, more precious yet because it is still there when so much is not.

When I first saw Tom’s photographs, my memories — the smells, the sounds, the light, all of it — came back to me in a rush, as real as the day I was there all those years ago.

Tom once wrote me:

“The Green Swamp and our other remaining longleaf pine forests appear to be so simple and ‘even boring.’ From a distance our savannas appear to be composed of only one kind of tree (longleaf) and one kind of grass (wire grass). But take a closer look, and wow!”

He went on to explain:

“The biodiversity found in these places — rare carnivorous plants, exquisite flowers, and unusual insects and birds — form tight-knit communities in which all things are connected. The success of each living thing is dependent on the success of their neighbors. We have a lot to learn from the land of the longleaf pine.”

I hope you enjoy Tom’s photographs as much as I do.

Lucky for us, we can find all 14 seasons of Tom’s award-winning show “Exploring North Carolina” at WUNC-TV’s website. And to learn how you can support the Green Swamp Preserve and other critical land conservation efforts in our part of the world, be sure to check out the website for the Nature Conservancy’s North Carolina chapter. 

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

At first light we gathered at the Friendship Holiness Church, down on the edge of the great swamp country that makes up the headwaters of the Lockwoods Folly River.

The church is in the heart of a community called Piney Grove, which is in Brunswick County, North Carolina, between the little town of Bolivia and the Green Swamp.

This was just a few days ago, on the Monday morning of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The day broke chilly, but the only clouds that I could see in the sky were far to the east, over the Atlantic, and they were a breathtaking shade of red.

I remembered the words in Homer’s “The Odyssey”: “Child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn.”

I always love going to Piney Grove. My friend Marion Evans is the keeper of the community’s stories and she’s a fantastic local historian, as well as just a really special person.

Marion had invited me to spend the day with 25 or 30 of her family members as they went in search of the community’s history in the local woods and swamps.

Their ancestor, Caesar Evans, had escaped from slavery during the Civil War and fought for his freedom in the Union army. After the war, he and his family had worked and saved until they could buy 228 acres there in that central part of Brunswick County.

 I highly recommend a visit to the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington to see Marion’s wonderful short film about the life of Caesar Evans and the birth of Piney Grove. It’s running continuously as part of the museum’s Monument exhibit thru March 31. 

You can also learn more about Marion Evans’ remarkable work on Piney Grove’s history in my story “A Day in Piney Grove: A Journey into Brunswick County’s Past.” 

That land became the community of Piney Grove, and with the exception of me, everybody there that morning was one of Caesar Evans’ descendants and a son or daughter of Piney Grove.

I just felt lucky to be there. It’s a wonderful family, and I was excited to spend a day with them.

We had a number of goals for the day. First, we were hoping to find the site of an old tar kiln that was run by the Evans family at least in the early 20th century and probably quite a bit earlier.

Marion’s sister Melissa had found the site of the tar kiln marked on a 1913 survey chart of the family’s land. She had brought the survey chart to the church with her.

The family was also hoping to find several other sites that their elders had told them about when they were young.

Those sites included the community’s old cart road, two or three burial grounds, a haunted spot or two (so the old people said), a shingle mill’s tram road, and a low-lying place deep in the woods that the community’s elders had simply called “The Hole.”

According to Marion’s grandmother, The Hole was a place of refuge down in the swamps. Before we left the church, Marion explained that it was “the place where they used to hide.”

Everybody except for me seemed to understand exactly what that meant without any explanation, but I had to ask.

Vinnie Joyner, one of Marion’s cousins, explained The Hole to me: In the old days, he said, they took shelter there when the nightriders came.

He explained that their ancestors always had a plan for evacuating the community’s children quickly to The Hole and for defending themselves once they were there.

Some of the ladies made a wonderful breakfast for us in the church’s annex, then we headed out into the woods. Nearly everybody was on foot, though two of the guys did ride their ATVs until the woods got too thick for them.

We had the survey chart to help guide us, but we relied more on the young people.

Most of the young guys and at least one of the young women were hunters and knew those woods inside out. A few of them had brought their shotguns, or more, and seemed ready for anything.

The whole day was just a delight. We found everything we were looking for, except for the tram road, and a few other things, too. And now and then, we’d all pause and Marion or one of her relatives would tell a story, often a tale that they remembered hearing when they were children.

As we wandered deeper into the forest, the sun rose above the trees. The day warmed up. The woods and swamps came out of the shadows and we could take in the beauty of the land in all its glory.

Spirits were high, too. Even when the undergrowth was so thick that we could only see a few feet in front of us, the forest was filled with laughter and the sounds of storytelling.

I am writing this at a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am waiting for a friend to finish up a round of treatment.

And as I think back on my day in Piney Grove, I guess I remember two things most of all.

Both will make me sound like an old fogey, but well, we are who we are.

First of all, I remember the kindness and almost old-fashioned solicitousness of Piney Grove’s young people.

Again and again, they helped me and the other older people across creeks and ditches and opened our way through overgrown paths by pushing brambles aside or holding back branches.

Personally, I don’t think that I always needed so much help, but the young guys did it with so much generosity of spirit that it did just kind of warm my heart.

And I remember one of the young men, a gentle soul named Javelin Bell, who saw at one point that I was feeling a little unsettled as we crossed along the edges of a big swamp.

He just came over and whispered real soft like, “You don’t have to worry about nothing. You’re with family.” And after he said that, I didn’t worry anymore.

As much as that meant to me, something else meant even more.

I have to confess that, in my line of work, I have grown accustomed to it being older people who care most about the stories from our past.

In many settings where I go to talk about history, the room is full of people who are at least as old as I am. I don’t mind that — I’m interested in sharing the little I know with people of any age. But I do notice how rarely young people are in the room.

But the young people of Piney Grove were different. When Marion paused to tell a story, they crowded near to hear her.

And when some of the young people asked me about Abraham Galloway, they crowded around me.

Abraham Galloway, the subject of my book “The Fire of Freedom,” had family roots in that part of Brunswick County; his mother came from the area around Piney Grove.

Their enthusiasm, and the joy they took in the day, seemed boundless.

When we found an old graveyard, the young people didn’t stop until they removed the leaves and the dirt around every last headstone so we could all read the inscriptions.

And whether we were exploring one of the burial grounds or standing by the old refuge that they called The Hole, those young people showed a kind of respect and reverence for the sacredness of those places and for the importance of the stories that made me instantly and forever lose my heart to them.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

These photographs were taken at a Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, camp on Bell Island in Hyde County in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they were taken by one of the young men who served at Bell Island. The young man’s full name was Anthony Troy Elliott — he went by Troy — and had grown up on a small farm in Perquimans County, 70 miles to the north.

Born in 1914, Elliott was one of the 200 men ages 17 to 25 who made up Co. 424 when it was at Bell Island.

Young Elliott’s photographs may not be the most artful, but I am especially fond of them because they are so full of life and yet also give us a glimpse at a part of the Great Depression on the North Carolina coast that we rarely see elsewhere.

View from the pier that Co. 424 built on Rose Bay looking back to the camp’s tents, 1935. The camp’s first enrollees came from Brunswick, Durham, Granville, Halifax, New Hanover, Onslow, and Wilson counties. Within the year, a healthy contingent of the camp’s young men also came from Hyde County, where Bell Island is located. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Troy Elliott and his companions at Bell Island were creating what is now the Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge, a critically important wintering ground for migratory waterfowl.

The CCC’s Co. 424, the top photo, was based on Bell Island from 1933 to 1937. In the autumn of 1937, the camp was closed and the company was relocated to a new site at New Holland, 14 miles to the east on the shores of Lake Mattamuskeet.

At New Holland, CCC Co. 424 did much of the work necessary to create the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge. That work included transforming an abandoned pumping station into one of the state’s most iconic landmarks, the Mattamuskeet Lodge.

The members of Co. 424 were among 3 million young, single, unemployed men of all colors and races, whose families got through the Great Depression with the help of the CCC.

A pair of friends posing by their quarters, Bell Island, 1935. By the end of 1933, approximately 1,500 CCC camps had been built in the U.S. and its territories. Between that time and the CCC’s termination in 1942, more than 100 CCC camps were located in North Carolina. They were all segregated by race, and that number included nine camps set aside for African Americans, as well as six for World War I veterans, four for white veterans, two for Black veterans. As was the case with nearly all of the state’s anti-poverty programs in the first half of the 20th century, CCC funds were spent disproportionately for the benefit of the state’s white citizens. In the case of the CCC, the agency’s administrators maintained strict quotas on the participation of Black and Native American men. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Created by the Emergency Conservation Work Act of 1933, the CCC was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs aimed at helping American citizens survive the poverty and unemployment that plagued the United States during the Great Depression.

In addition to earning wages, CCC laborers also addressed some of the nation’s most fundamental needs: building infrastructure, preserving wildlife habitat, and restoring soil, forests, and other parts of our natural heritage that in many cases had been devastated by generations of unhindered exploitation.

In the words of the Act, the purpose of the CCC was to relieve “the acute condition of widespread distress and unemployment” and “to provide for the restoration of the country’s depleted natural resources and the advancement of an orderly program of useful public works.”

The mission of the CCC laborers at Bell Island was to create what is now known as the Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge, a 42,000-acre wetlands that provides shelter and feeding grounds for migratory waterfowl. Their work included building fire towers, fire lanes, ditching, a long pier into Rose Bay, a keeper’s house, fishermen’s camps, and a raised, mile-long road — we can see its path being cleared here — across the swamplands north of the camp that connected Bell Island to the mainland a few miles west of Swan Quarter. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

The CCCers built roads and bridges, fought forest fires, planted some 3 billion trees, carried out major erosion control projects, and built national parks, state parks and wildlife refuges.

In North Carolina, they built, or helped build, many of the state’s most cherished landmarks, parks and historic sites.

Those CCC projects included the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Macon State Park, the Pisgah National Forest, the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, and Waterside Theater, where “The Lost Colony” is performed, among many others.

The mosquitoes of Hyde County were and still are legendary, and one of the first newspaper reports that I found on the Bell Island camp focused on them. Appearing in the Elizabeth City Independent July 23, 1933, the article began, “Over on Bell Island 200 youthful members of the Civilian Conservation Corps are making war on mosquitoes.” Evidently much of the camp’s early work focused on mosquito control, which at that time usually meant a great deal of ditch digging in salt marshes and swamplands. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

A pair of young men fishing, hunting or just “proggin’” on one of the ditches that Co. 424 had dug at Bell Island 1935. The mosquitoes were no fun, but Co. 424’s single hardest moment was probably the great hurricane of September 1933. I know few details about the damage caused by the storm on that part of Rose Bay, but news reports indicated that the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Pamlico answered a distress call from the CCC camp and rushed there with food and supplies. Bell Island is only a few feet above sea level and the hurricane’s storm surge inevitably flooded the camp and cut off the road that the CCC work crews were building to the mainland. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

When Co 424’s camp was built at Bell Island, a quarter of all men in the United States were unemployed. Record numbers of farmers had lost their land. Across the nation, the wages of those who still had jobs had fallen on average by almost half since 1929.

In much of the rural South, the number of down and out was even higher. Nearly half of families in Dare County, for instance, just down the road from Bell Island, were on state or county relief, though it amounted to next to nothing at that time.

In the early years of the Great Depression, there was no national safety net: no Social Security, no unemployment insurance, and no federal programs to aid mothers, children, the elderly or the disabled who were in need of food, shelter or health care.

CCCers on the roadbed that they were building between Bell Island and the mainland, 1935. At the beginning, the CCC camp at Bell Island fell under the command of a Capt. Gervais of the U.S. Army’s 4th Field Artillery. That was not unusual. In 1933, regular Army officers led all CCC camps. However, by the summer of 1934, or thereabouts, they were replaced with officers from the Army Reserves. Civilians made up most of a CCC camp’s staff. At Bell Island, much of Co. 424’s original civilian staff — a clerk, a steward, medics, one of the work foremen, etc.– had been recruited in Wilson County, 100 miles to the west. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Later in the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration and the U.S. Congress created many of the federal programs that we now have to address those needs. Along with new legal protections for workers organizing labor unions, they made up the New Deal.

Disillusionment with capitalism and the power of banks and industry had rarely if ever been higher in American history. At the time, the nation’s business leaders widely credited the New Deal with staving off popular uprising, anarchy and even revolution.

A trio of cooks outside the mess hall on Bell Island, 1935. I do not think that I am exaggerating if I say that the opportunity to have three square meals a day was one of the most compelling reasons that young men in eastern North Carolina enrolled in the CCC. Hunger stalked the land during the Great Depression, and many of the region’s people did not have that same opportunity. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Neil Howell, who grew up near Kinston, was 17 years old when he enrolled in Co. 424. At a reunion in 1993, he remembered his first days in Hyde County. “I was scared,” he told an AP reporter. “I had never been away from home before.” Howell soon got over his homesickness though. “We had a good bunch of people,” he remembered. Quote is from the the Greensboro News & Record, June 7, 1993. In this photo, we can see the camp’s enrollees lining up outside the mess hall at Bell Island. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

For many on the North Carolina coast, the CCC was the first tangible benefit that they received from the New Deal.

In the CCC, the young men worked for a dollar day and most considered themselves lucky. They were permitted to keep a few dollars a month for themselves, but the CCC sent the bulk of their wages to their families to help meet their most basic needs.

In addition to building the migratory waterfowl refuge, the CCC enrollees at Bell Island often continued their educations. For many, that was a rare second chance. Many dropped out of school by the age of 12 or 13, or even earlier, so that they could go to work and help support their families. In the spring of 1934, Forest Humphrey, a CCC enrollee from Jacksonville, reported that Co. 424’s civilian staff were offering classes in boat building, first aid, and in basic subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. See the Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, April 27,1934. Many years later, another CCC veteran recalled that he learned the electrician’s trade while in Co. 424. He apparently made his living as an electrician for the rest of his life. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

For many families, those wages proved the difference between abject poverty and getting by.

A $25 a month check from the CCC would not solve all problems, and a young man’s service in the CCC was limited to two years. But at least for a time, their CCC wages might stave off hunger, save a family farm, or make it possible to buy clothes so that younger brothers and sisters could go to school, among much else.

Reflecting the status of women in American society at that time, the CCC was not open to women. However, having a son in the CCC was often especially important to female heads of households who had been widowed, abandoned by husbands, or had a disabled husband, all of which were far more common situations at that time than is generally appreciated.

This photo may have been taken on Mother’s Day, 1935. A year earlier, when Mother’s Day fell on May 13, the camp’s commander at the time, Capt. Watts Cooke, had made a special request for the young men at Bell Island to write letters to their mothers “as an expression of love and appreciation.” He also authorized them to invite their mothers to visit the camp on that day, which about 30 of the boys’ mothers did. Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, April 27, 1934. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Interviewed in his 70s, one of Co. 424’s veterans, Ed Biggs, came from one of those families.

“Mama had a big garden and some livestock, but that’s all they had to depend on,” he told a reporter covering a Co. 424 reunion that was held at Lake Mattamuskeet in 1993.

One of the most popular pastimes at Bell Island was baseball. The camp’s correspondent, Forest Humphrey, reported that his mates had organized eight teams by the spring of 1934, as well as put together a camp team to play teams in the two nearest towns, Swan Quarter and Belhaven. The Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record in Belhaven occasionally reported on their games. A July 6, 1934 article, for instance, noted that “the Bell Island baseball team played the Pungo River team here last week.” The article went on to say, “the boys have shown great spirit and took defeat from the Pungo boys– score 6-1– with a grin. The Bell Island team hopes to even up the score later on.” Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

CCC Co. 424 held dances in the rec hall at Bell Island. In the April 13, 1934, edition of the Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, I found a notice of a dance that was held in honor a group of the young men who were finishing their CCC service and headed home. Refreshments were served. Halett Deans’ orchestra, from Belhaven, played. And the revelry lasted until midnight. With a wink to high society gossip columns of the day, Forest Humphrey gushed that the dance “turned out to be the outstanding social event of the spring season.” The CCC camp hosted another dance only a month later, on the fourth of May. The CCCers advertised the dance in Belhaven’s newspaper, and they used the proceeds from the cover charge to buy equipment and uniforms for their baseball club. From Belhaven Times and the Hyde County Record, Belhaven, April 27, 1934

Troy Elliott, fifth from left, at an ice cream social with a crowd of local friends in Hyde County, 1935. The back of the photograph identifies the group, from left, as Edward Gibbs, Hilda Midgett, Audrey Cahoon, Sybil Midgett, Troy Elliott, Eva Gray Berry, Belton Midgett, and an unidentified young woman, with Cecil Gibbs kneeling with the ice cream maker. The young men may have been among the Hyde County enrollees who served with Troy Elliott at Bell Island. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

I am sure to no one’s surprise, Co. 424 was not at Bell Island long before romance was in the air. At Co. 424’s Christmas dance on Dec. 23, 1933, a pair of weddings between the camp’s servicemen and local women were announced. Sgt. Harold D. Hampton, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, had married Ila Mae Lee of Swan Quarter, and Cpl. Oscar Ramness, of Ada, Minnesota, had married Alice Lee Harris, also of Swan Quarter. A Rev. Lowe had performed both weddings at the Methodist church’s parsonage in Swan Quarter. Of other loves, including ones perhaps not as sanctioned, the historical record is silent. See Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, Jan. 5, 1934. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

The young men of Co. 424 were based at Bell Island for a little more than four years. Then, on Oct. 25, 1937, the CCC transferred the company to the new site in another part of Hyde County.

That new site was in New Holland, a village on the south side of Lake Mattamuskeet.

In New Holland, Co. 424’s members developed the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge. They built waterfowl impoundments, roads, and fire breaks, as well as transformed an old pumping station into the Mattamuskeet Lodge, a three-story inn with a 120-foot viewing tower.

Through their efforts, the wildlife refuge became one of the nation’s great wintering grounds for tundra swans, snow geese, and other migratory waterfowl.

In the summer of 1993, Co. 424 held a reunion at the Mattamuskeet Lodge. One of my favorite quotes from newspaper coverage of the event was from a local woman who lived near the CCC camp when it was at New Holland. “We used to go to the dances with the CCC boys at the Barber Shanty dance hall up the road,” she recalled. “One of them was my first love, but I’m not going to tell you any names because he’s here.” Photo by Jim Bounds/AP. From the Greensboro News & Record, June 7, 1993.

Over the years, when I drive east on U.S. 264, I have turned many times onto that mile-long gravel road that leads to Bell Island and that I now know was built by Co. 424 during the Great Depression.

At those times, I always follow the road down to its end and park by the long pier that reaches out into Rose Bay.

My favorite time of year to be there is winter, even though the wind often sweeps down across the bay and chills my bones something fierce. But on those days, I am usually on my own there, or perhaps I only have to share the pier with a stubborn fisherman or two, and I am left with my own thoughts and the beauty of the place.

I can look out across the salt marshes and the bay, listen to the wild geese overhead, and, if I have timed it right, take in the glory of the sunrise or sunset.

And of course when I am there, I always think of Troy Elliott and the other young men of Co. 424 who made a home there for that brief moment back in the 1930s.

I think about the lives they left behind, and what it must have been like to be together there, and how different it must have been to everything they had known before.

I think about how it must have seemed like a stolen season, a refuge from the worst travails of the Depression years. I imagine some of them even found it a chance to glory in being young in a way that their old lives had not allowed them.

They had grown up in the Great Depression, that age of hardship, loss, and doing without. And much like our world today, their world seemed to be falling apart around them.

Many of them, including Troy Elliott, would soon find themselves in camps that did not look that much different than the one on Rose Bay, except they’d be in distant lands where bombs were dropping and cities burning and death was running riot through the streets.

When I look at Elliott’s photographs, I love seeing the happiness on their faces when they were at Bell Island.

As I stand on the pier, looking back toward the old site of the CCC camp, I never forget to think about them. I am sure they were a handful, as most of us are at that age, but when I am there I always imagine them safe and sound in their tents on a winter night.

I picture them there beneath the stars, a few lights still burning, a whisper here and there, a prayer or two, some laughter, and of course all around them the murmur of the wild geese and tundra swans.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who shares on his website essays and lectures about the state’s coast. He brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives where he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

~

I have recently been absorbed by a photograph album that the staff at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Office of History discovered in their historical collections a few years ago.

The name of the photographer who took the photographs in the album is unknown, but they are a treasure.

Dating from 1930 to 1932, the album’s photographs make up a rare, up-close portrait of Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging crews and dredge boats engaged in maintaining and improving navigation on the hundreds of miles of coastal waterways between Norfolk, Virginia, and Beaufort.

That 200-mile stretch of coastline composed the Army Corps’ “Norfolk District,” headquartered in Norfolk.

The whole album is fascinating. However, my favorite scenes are probably a series of photographs from the Scuppernong River in the spring of 1931. They chronicle the crew of one of the Army Corps’ derrick barges clearing snags, dynamiting obstructions, and straightening the banks along the narrow, upper reaches of the river.

Dredging on a small, remote, out-of-the-way blackwater river such as the Scuppernong was a bread and butter job for Army Corps in those early years of the Great Depression. However, I can’t remember ever seeing that kind of work captured so fully in photographs.

Overall, the photographs are quite varied. The album even includes, for instance, a half-dozen photographs of Army Corps’ big pipeline dredge Currituck barreling through Beaufort Inlet on its way to build a new section of the Intracoastal Waterway.

In my experience, those of us who study maritime history rarely give much attention to dredging crews and their watercraft.

Working on a dredge boat was hard, dirty work. A bit like being a sailor, a bit like being a miner, a bit like being a heavy equipment operator, and a bit like being a pipe fitter and a mechanic, too.

The crews often lived on their boats for months at a time. They were not getting rich, and they moved from work site to work site, getting home, if they had a home, when they could.

Throughout the 20th century, many dredging crews all over the East Coast came from villages on the North Carolina coast.

They came from some coastal communities more than others. At Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks, for instance, or in Otway, in the Down East part of Carteret County, you would have been hard pressed to find a single family that did not have a father or a son who had not worked on a dredge boat at one time or another.

The Army Corps’ Norfolk District Photo Album, 1931-32 includes 99 photographs in all. You can now find them all online at Army Corps’ Digital Library.

I have picked out a selection of the photographs to highlight here. You will find them below, along with my annotations about the places, people, and activities depicted in them.

I have also included an especially striking photograph taken on the deck of the dredge Currituck that I found at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.

It is an up-close view of the Currituck’s cutterhead, the mammoth dredging tool that her crew used to dig much of the Intracoastal Waterway along the North Carolina coast.

The Mariners Museum, by the way, has copies of the Army Crops photographs in its library. You can access them online.

I don’t think this is the time to discuss the overall historical impact of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the North Carolina coast, either for the good or the bad.

However, I think that I should note that few entities of any kind have shaped either the geography or economy of the North Carolina coast more over the last 150 years.

Resting in the hands of the Army Corps’ dredging crews and those of its private contractors has been the very shape of our coastline and the character of much of maritime life and work.

That has included the depths and commercial viability of our harbors; the fate of our seaports; how far our rivers can be navigated; which inlets are navigable and which are not; where ferries can run, and where they cannot; where boats can find refuge; how vulnerable, or not, coastal towns are to hurricanes; and where, if at all, our commercial fishing fleets can get to sea, among much else.

In those same hands, again for better and for worse, has been the fates of whole coastal ecosystems.

Yet in all my years of studying the history of the North Carolina coast, I have never seen a book, a museum exhibit, or a historical marker about that part of our maritime heritage.

Many a time I have looked out onto a harbor or an inlet and watched a dredging crew at work and wondered what their lives were like, and how they do what they do, and what it is like to endeavor to shape and bend the sea and shore against nature’s will.

Of course, the photographs in the Army Corps’ Norfolk District Photo Album, 1931-32 are far from the full story.

They only show us a brief moment in history, and just a few waterways. But to me they are still invaluable. At the very least, they give us a glimpse of this usually unseen part of our maritime history and leave us with a yearning to know more.

* * *

The following is a selection of the album’s photographs and a little background on what is happening.

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-7-

-8-

-9-

-10-

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

-15-

-16-

-17-

Note from the author, North Carolina historian David Cecelski: This is an updated version of a short essay that I first published two years ago. To write this version, I drew on additional research that I did in preparation for giving a special lecture to mark the New Bern Historical Society’s 100th anniversary. That event was held Nov. 12 at Craven County Community College in New Bern. The event was sold out and I was deeply impressed at the local interest in the subject. 

A friend in New Bern recently sent me an issue of the Raleigh News & Observer that he found in his family’s old papers. The newspaper’s date was Nov. 5, 1898. A front-page article was about a large white supremacy meeting at the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern.

That was only a few days before the massacre of Black citizens in Wilmington that was in the news so much a few months ago.

Wilmington, the state’s largest city at that time, was 90 miles from New Bern. However, as I read the issue of the News & Observer that my friend sent me, I couldn’t help but feel that what happened in Wilmington could easily have happened in New Bern, too.

‘White Supremacy Plum’

On that fifth day of November 1898, the News & Observer featured a large drawing of a plum on the top of its front page. The artist had labeled the fruit “White Supremacy Plum.”

Above the drawing was a headline: “A Fruit We All Like.”  Below the drawing was another headline: “We Will Pluck It on the 8^th.”

The Nov. 8, 1898, was the date of the fall elections. At the time, the News & Observer was playing a central role in a white supremacy movement that reached across North Carolina.

The story from New Bern appeared under the drawing of the “White Supremacy Plum.” Its headline read:

PATIENCE CEASES: Ringing Resolutions Adopted by White Men

With a summary of the story’s content appeared beneath those words.

WHITES WHO VOTE WITH THE NEGROES DENOUNCED

as traitors to race and country

Will have Nothing to do with them, White Labor To Be Employed Instead Of Colored, Strong Speeches by Shaw, Bryan and Others

The story began below those words. According to the newspaper’s correspondent, a mass meeting of “the white men of Newbern [sic]” had been held at the Craven County Courthouse. At that meeting, many of the town’s wealthiest and most influential white citizens had gathered to make a statement on white supremacy.

The chairman of the meeting was Alfred Decator “A.D.” Ward, a prominent local attorney. He was originally from Duplin County, where he had been mayor of Kenansville and where he had been elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Probably the most prominent of the city leaders at the meeting was James A. Bryan. At the time, Bryan was the president of both the National Bank of New Bern and the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad Co.

He was also one of the largest landowners in the state of North Carolina. His holdings included, but were not limited to, more than 57,000 acres in what is now the Croatan National Forest.

Bryan owned and resided in what is now known as the John Wright Stanly House, which is one of the historic sites at Tryon Palace. Educated at Princeton, he later chaired the Craven County Board of Commissioners for two decades and served a term each as mayor of New Bern and state senator.

According to the story in the News & Observer, both James A. Bryan and A.D. Ward were among the local leaders that gave “enthusiastic and patriotic speeches” during the white supremacy meeting.

‘Deliverance from Negro Domination’

At the Craven County Courthouse, the white leaders passed five resolutions that were very similar to ones that the white supremacists in Wilmington passed that same week, just prior to the massacre and coup d’etat there.

In the first resolution, they resolved that:

“It is the duty of every white person, male and female, to do everything in their power to achieve an honorable deliverance from negro domination and its accompanying ruin and disgrace.”

At that time, African Americans made up about 65% of New Bern’s population. In any free and fair election, Black citizens would inevitably have held a significant number of offices.

The town’s African Americans did hold some elective offices, but relatively few. Black citizens held three of the 11 positions on New Bern’s board of aldermen, for instance. That was a large number compared to many other North Carolina towns, but far from what one could reasonably call “negro domination.”

In this first resolution, the white supremacists were announcing that they would no longer tolerate even that degree of Black participation in politics in New Bern or the rest of Craven County.

‘Traitors to their race and country’

The meeting’s second resolution read:

“That it is the sense of this meeting that from henceforth all white men who vote and ally themselves in politics with the negro shall be denounced and regarded as traitors to their race and country and as public enemies, and not to be associated with.”

A duly elected political coalition of Republicans (largely Black) and Populists (largely white) had governed North Carolina since 1894. In this resolution, the city’s white supremacists were threatening their white neighbors who persisted in supporting that coalition of Black and white voters.

The language of the resolution is noteworthy. In many parts of the world, and at many different times, extremist political movements have begun to refer to their political opponents as “public enemies” and “traitors to their race and country.” It is never a good sign, and of course it is often a prelude to great violence and widespread persecution.

The white supremacists in Wilmington also used that kind of language just before the shooting started.

‘Traitors to the white race’

The meeting’s third resolution read:

“That we denounce such traitors to the white race as make a business of organizing the negro, and we hereby warn [them] to desist from their efforts to further ruin and humiliate the white people ere the day of forbearance shall pass and the time shall come when an outraged people shall realize that such creatures are nothing more than beasts of prey to be driven away.”

In this resolution, New Bern’s white supremacists continued to use language that demonized their opponents. In this case, they were threatening local white leaders of the Republican Party.

Calling them “beasts of prey” also sounds very much like Wilmington just before the shooting started.

‘Brave and honorable men’

The meeting’s fourth resolution read:

“That while our brothers of the white race in other communities are bravely daring all danger to rid themselves and us of the dark cloud of negro domination, it behooves us to encourage them with the assurance that we, too, have resolved to use every means that brave and honorable men may for the deliverance and salvation of our State from the horrible fate which threatens.”

In this resolution, the white supremacists in New Bern were making clear that they knew what was about to happen in Wilmington and they supported it.

That they knew what was going to happen in Wilmington was not surprising. By the Nov. 5, 1898, it was widely known that white supremacists were planning to take control of Wilmington three days later, even if they had to resort to violence in the streets, massive electoral fraud and military rule.

Newspaper reporters from as far away as Chicago were already on their way to Wilmington because they had gotten wind of the coming storm.

In this resolution, New Bern’s white supremacy leaders signaled that they knew what was coming in Wilmington, too. They also seem to be saying that they would take similar steps in New Bern if necessary.

‘Preference to white people’

The white supremacists in New Bern intended the fifth and final resolution to encourage New Bern’s poor and working class white men to support their efforts. The resolution read:

“That we, the employers of labor, will give preference to white people in all cases wherever practicable.”

In this resolution, the town’s leading businessmen were promising white workers that they would hire them in their shops and factories over Black workers, even if the Black workers were more qualified and had more experience, if the white workers supported the “white supremacy ticket.”

They were, in effect, cutting a deal: side with us, and not your fellow Black workers, and we will look out for you.

The same thing happened in Wilmington.

The business leaders in both cities proved true to their word. In the coming years, that kind of racial discrimination in employment became universal, and as much a part of Jim Crow as separate drinking fountains and segregated lunch counters.

A different kind of coup d’état

The Nov. 8 election was said to have passed peacefully in New Bern, though we know very little about what might have happened there and gone unsaid.

We do know though that the white supremacists prevailed. There was a bright spot or two for the town’s Black citizens: Isaac H. Smith, a prominent local Black businessman, for instance, won a seat to the NC House.

But he was the exception. The white men at the meeting that the News & Observer described on Nov. 5, 1898, became the town’s mayors, aldermen, county commissioners, educational leaders, state legislators and U. S. congressmen for the next generation.

We also know that, in the weeks after the election, the white supremacists did not wait for the town officials that had not been up for re-election in 1898 to serve out their terms before they moved to replace them. They instead convinced the state legislature to dissolve the city’s charter and throw all of their political opponents, both Black and white, out of office.

The North Carolina General Assembly voted to repeal New Bern’s charter on Feb. 3, 1899. At that time, the legislators put the city’s assets under the authority of a small group of trustees.

The act went into effect a week later, Feb. 10, 1899.

Ten days later, the General Assembly passed another act to incorporate the City of New Bern. The legislators named a new board of aldermen, purged the city’s voter rolls, and set a date for elections later that spring. When the new charter went into effect Feb. 20, 1899, white supremacists held all the power in the city.

For the sake of white supremacy, the City of New Bern did not exist for those 10 days.

For more on that chapter in the city’s history, see Dr. Thomas Hanchett and Ms. Ruth Little’s excellent 1994 report on the history of two of New Bern’s African American neighborhoods, Long Wharf and Duffyfield.

In that way, the white supremacists in New Bern accomplished their own kind a coup d’état, much like what happened in Wilmington. Their coup was bloodless, as far as we know, but just as effective.

It could have been even worse. Judging from the Nov. 5, 1898, issue of the News & Observer that my friend shared with me, I find it hard not to think that, if things had gone just a little differently, and if a spark had been lit, we might well be talking about bodies in the streets of New Bern, too.

~

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who shares on his website essays and lectures about the state’s coast. He brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives where he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

***

Note from the author: I have written this as kind of an online history exhibit. The story starts with a short introduction, then features more than 40 annotated photographs and other images illustrating the last decades of an ancient swamp forest that was once located on the North Carolina coast. 

***

For quite some time, I have been collecting historical photographs, maps, and manuscripts that document the lumber boomtowns and logging camps of the Pungo River and its hinterlands in the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

After the Civil War, lumber companies bought thousands of square miles of forestlands on the North Carolina coast. As if out of nowhere, scores of lumber mill towns sprang up virtually overnight (only to vanish, most of them, when the forest was gone).

The lumber companies reshaped the land, our most important towns, and even some of our most remote islands.

Logging camps seemed to be everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of railroads were built to move logging machinery into even the most remote swamp forests, to haul logs to mills, and to carry lumber after it was milled to northern seaports.

Canals were built to drain swamp forests. Lumber barges and schooners crowded local waterways.

For the sake of building America, coastal forests that had stood for centuries, and sometimes millennia, vanished.

I do not know to what I can compare that part of North Carolina’s coastal history. It was a frontier world, often almost lawless, dangerous, destructive, and, for some, liberating, all at once.

Thousands of people left farms and fishing boats and their old lives to make a go of it in the mills and logwoods.

And they came from all over, not just from local towns and villages, but Appalachian hollows, Great Lakes logging camps, and New York City tenement houses.

They included men and women with the scars of slavery still on their backs, Outer Banks fishing families, and immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, many of them speaking barely a word of English — all made their way to the lumber mill towns and logging camps.

In this collection of historical images today, I am focusing on the lumber boom in just one corner of the North Carolina coast, the Pungo and the forests within about 15 miles of its shores.

But I hope that by so doing, we can at least get a glimpse of the size and scale of the lumber boom throughout the North Carolina coast, what it was like for the people who lived through it, and how it transformed our communities, as well as our land and waters.

Rising in the central part of Washington County, in the remnants of what local people today often call the “Big Swamp,” the Pungo, an Algonquin Indian word, is only 35 miles long.

In its northernmost reaches, the river flows today through a canal that was dug in the 1950s to drain the farmlands west of Pungo Lake and what is now the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

But then the river grows wild again. It meanders south, passing along breathtakingly beautiful cane brakes and marshlands until it opens up into a broad bay, an estuary really, that eventually folds itself into the Pamlico River and the Pamlico Sound.

Today it is a quiet, peaceful place. Belhaven, the only town on the river, has a population of less than 1,500. Pantego (another Algonquin name), the only town on any of the river’s tributaries, has maybe a few more than 200 residents.

It is a place of rural byways and little crossroads: when you leave Belhaven, you can go 25 miles in any direction — east, west, north, or south — and never hit a stoplight.

But as you will see here, the Pungo was once a very different place.

As you look through these old photographs and yellowed maps, please know that I am, as people sometimes say, a “lifetime learner.” I would always welcome hearing from anyone who might know more about any of these images.

In studying the Pungo’s lumber boom, one thing is very clear to me though: whatever other stories I tell, anything I write will also be an elegy. It just has to be.

The Pungo River was once the heart of one of America’s great natural wonders. When you left the river’s shores, you entered a vast wilderness, a swamp forest that covered hundreds of square miles and was so large and so foreboding that it had long been a refuge for the local Algonquin people, fugitive slaves, and other outcasts.

For those who care about our natural heritage, it was a marvel: the East Dismal Swamp, as I am going to call it,  was home to ancient and majestic groves of bald cypress, some of the country’s largest stands of Atlantic white cedar (juniper), and pocosin wetlands of a size and grandeur found in few other places on Earth.

But especially between 1880 and 1920, the logging companies and land developers did not just log the Pungo’s old-growth forests: they erased them.

Using railroads and new kinds of machinery, they logged even the most remote corners of the East Dismal. Then, especially in the pocosins, they dug great canals and vast networks of ditches to drain the land. When the peat soils dried out, they then burned what was left of the forest and the peat beds again and again.

They did that until the East Dismal Swamp — or whatever you want to call that great swamp wilderness — was gone.

If you visit the site of the East Dismal today, you will find only a broad, open plain and seeming endless farm fields, stretching, in many places almost treeless, as far as the eye can see.

You might think that you were in Kansas or Nebraska, if it were not for the miles and miles of canals and ditches.

History is for me, when all is said and done, about remembrance and recalling the ancestors.

And through them, coming to know ourselves.

But there are also times when I think that we should remember lost places, out of respect for them and maybe for our own good, too. I think that this is one of those times.

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-7-

-8-

-9-

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

-15-

-16-

-17-

-18-

-19-

-20-

-21-

-22-

-23-

-24-

-25-

-26-

-27-

-28-

-29-

-30-

-31-

-32-

-33-

-34-

-35-

-36-

-37-

-38-

-39-

-40-

-41-

-42-

-43-

-44-

***

Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

More than 50 years ago, a beloved high school history teacher named Morgan Harris went in search of the abandoned lumber mill towns of Hyde County.

Mr. Harris passed away a couple years ago, but I remember him well. He was kind enough to meet with me two or three times when I was writing my book “Along Freedom Road,” which was about the history of the civil rights movement on that part of the North Carolina coast.

He was very helpful to me, and he taught me a great deal about Hyde County’s history.

The maps that I am featuring here grew out of his history classes at Mattamuskeet High School. While researching local history, he and his students produced four, hand-drawn maps of lumber mill villages that had been built in Hyde County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later disappeared.

Harris knew that other lumber mill boomtowns had also existed in Hyde County. However, he and his students could only find enough information to draw maps of four of them.

He later published those maps in his excellent book, “Hyde Yesterdays: A History of Hyde County.”

I think those maps are a treasure worth sharing. Every county on the North Carolina coast once had similar lumber mill boomtowns in them, and some quite a few. They are a window into a part of North Carolina’s coastal history that is rarely remembered.

Most of those old lumber mill villages vanished long ago, and now all memory of them is vanishing, too. However, thanks to Morgan Harris and his students, we can at least get a feeling for a few of them.

I am not sure why the mere knowledge of their existence matters so much to me, but it does: I sometimes fear that I am getting a bit like poor Noah, trying to get everybody on the ark before the flood.

As for the rest — the substance of the mill villagers’ lives, their love stories and broken hearts, their struggles for a better life, the songs they sang, the aromas of their camp kitchens and all the other things that really matter in our lives– that is left to our imaginations.

Rotersville: On the Ridge Northeast of Lake Mattamuskeet

This is Morgan Harris’s map of a sawmill boomtown called Rotersville. It was located in a remote community known as Deep Woods, which occupied a sandy ridge on the northeast side of Lake Mattamuskeet. It stood on the edge of what was at that time a great swampy wilderness that reached all the way north to the Alligator River.

Established sometime in the 1920s, the little village included the Rotersville Lumber Co.’s sawmill, a machine shop, commissary, and a cluster of 12 or 14 houses.

According to Harris’s sources, the people of Deep Woods had no other stores in the area, so they often traded at Rotersville’s company’s store even if they did not work for the lumber company.

One old-timer also remembered seeing convict laborers shopping at the company’s store, though he did not say how they came to be there or what currency they might have used.

Morgan Harris’s sources indicated that the railroad on the map was a logging road that led from Rotersville to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, a distance of about 7.5 miles. The company’s train apparently transported lumber to the waterway, where it was loaded onto barges and shipped north.

Next to Lake Mattamuskeet, the Rotersville Lumber Co.’s black workers bunked down nights in a group of railroad boxcars.

See Roy T. Sawyer’s fascinating article in the spring 2008 issue of Tyrrell Branches for more on the construction of that part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

Hydeland: A Village on Juniper Bay

The second of Morgan Harris’s maps gives us a glimpse at a lumber mill boomtown roughly 15 miles southwest of Rotersville, down close to the shores of the Pamlico Sound.

Financed by a pair of wealthy Virginia lumbermen, the Hydeland Lumber Co. built a mill village that came to be known as “Hydeland” south of Lake Mattamuskeet in or about 1917.

The site was located just inland of Juniper Bay, a broad, marshy bay on the Pamlico Sound, 5 miles east of the current state ferry landing in Swan Quarter.

Around the time of the First World War, the Hydeland Lumber Co. accumulated thousands of acres of swamp forest between Juniper Bay and West Bluff Bay.

Evidently, the company also bought at least timber rights to forests — principally cypress, gum and juniper stands, I would think — on the southeast side of Lake Mattamuskeet. In the lower right corner of Harris’s map, we can see that a logging railroad once ran from Lake Landing to the company’s mill in Hydeland.

By 1919, according to Harris, the company’s workers were cutting approximately 52,000 board feet of lumber a day. They had also dredged a canal from Juniper Bay into Hydeland so that barges could carry the company’s lumber south into the Pamlico Sound and then west to the Norfolk & Southern’s railhead in Belhaven.

As you can see on the map, Hydeland had two hotels/boardinghouses, one for whites on the west side of the canal and one for African Americans on the canal’s east side. Will Spencer and his wife “Miss Benie” ran the former; Artie Gaylord, the latter.

Black millworkers and loggers stayed in quarters on the east side of the canal. The company’s white workers stayed in housing on the west side of the canal. Two, one or two-room schools, one for white children, one for black children, were just up the road.

Hydeland was a bustling little town in the early 1920s. Local people recalled that community events — dances, medicine shows, and the like — were often held at the company’s store there.

They recalled that the James Adams Floating Theater even visited Hydeland on at least one occasion.

They also remembered local farmers selling produce to the company’s workers, and the line of local people’s fishing boats that used to tie up at the company’s wharf.

When Morgan Harris explored the former site of Hydeland some years ago, all he could find of its former glory was the canal and the sunken remains of one of the company’s lumber barges.

Burrell: In the Headwaters of the Pungo River

This is the third of Morgan Harris’s maps. It shows the lumber mill town of Burrell, which was located in what at that time was still the headwaters of the Pungo River.

The mill village’s location was approximately a mile west of what is now the main entrance to the Pungo Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, in a section of northwest Hyde County known as Grassy Ridge.

As you can see on Morgan Harris’s map, Burrell was built on the New Holland, Higginsport & Mount Vernon Railroad, a 35-mile-long branch line that ran from Wenona, in southern Washington County, to the pumping station at Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County.

The Burrell Lumber Co. heavily logged local swamp forests all the way from Pungo Lake to Alligator Lake, 10 miles to the east. That area included some of the most majestic stands of old-growth Atlantic white cedar (juniper) forest anywhere in the world.

As you can see on the map, Burrell included, besides the company’s mill, a company store, a railroad station, and a large barracks for housing mill workers and loggers.

According to local lore, Davis Landing, shown on the map just below the Burrell mill store and barracks, was the site of an Algonquin village late into the 19th century. The village seemed to vanish with the forest.

To my knowledge, no trace of Burrell has survived to the present day, unless we count the railroad bed. The New Holland, Higginsport & Mount Vernon Railroad is long gone, but the old railroad bed is now the foundation for N.C. Highway 45, at least in that part of Hyde County.

Berkley: A Shanty Town on Scranton Creek

This is the last of Morgan Harris’s maps. It shows the shanty town of Berkley, which was located on Scranton Creek on the east side of the Lower Pungo River, in the southwest corner of Hyde County.

When Harris visited with them, local old-timers remembered Berkley as a hard-drinking, hard-living place and as a refuge for drifters and the dispossessed.

The inhabitants of Berkley, the men at least, worked for the Scranton Land and Lumber Co., which had been chartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1889. According to news reports at the time, the company’s holdings in Hyde County exceeded 100,000 acres of woodlands on that east side of the Pungo River. (Scranton Republican, Sept. 16, 1892)

Most of the company’s workers were African American. As we can see on the map, their little settlement grew up around what is now called the Cat Town Road, just across Scranton Creek from the Scranton Land and Lumber Co.’s mill.

According to Morgan Harris’s sources, Berkley burnt to the ground after a not especially sober customer at one of the settlement’s liquor houses accidentally started a fire that got out of control.

Makleyville: A Village on Slade Creek

Another lumber mill village, Makleyville, which was mentioned but not mapped by Morgan Harris, was located at the mouth of Slade Creek, a lovely stream that flows into the Pungo River five miles south of Belhaven. A wealthy Edenton merchant named Metrah Makely first established a sawmill there in the 1880s.

(Metrah Makely was the little community’s namesake, but I always see its name spelled slightly different: Makleyville.)

By 1891-92, however, Makleyville and its sawmill were purchased by the Scranton Land and Lumber Co.

The Makleyville Hotel was the village’s center. In addition to providing rooms for visitors, the hotel served as the Makleyville’s post office and company store.

According to a 1949 article in the Belhaven Times written by Ethel Ayers Gibbs, the daughter of the hotel’s former managers, the hotel also served as a boardinghouse.

In that article, Ms. Gibbs recalled that “drummers, as traveling salesmen were called in those days, came by boat to Makleyville.” The drummers stayed in the hotel and, she recalled, two local men, W. J. Harris of Swan Quarter and Will Harris of Leechville, carried them and their wares around that part of Hyde County.

The village of Makleyville included sawmills, dry kilns, living quarters for the workers, a pair of warehouses, and a long wharf that reached into the Pungo River. Most of the buildings were built over the water, boosted up by sawdust and pilings.

In her article in the Belhaven Times, Ms. Gibbs recalled that “Makleyville at its peak had around 200 population and men from outlaying farms [also] worked at odd times at the mill.”

She noted that she had “seen as many as six and eight big barges from Baltimore up at the mill loading at one time.”

Wharf Pilings and Sawdust

Everything — towns, railroads, shipping traffic, and the old-growth forests themselves — seemed to come and go quickly during the lumber industry’s heyday on the North Carolina coast.

The fate of those lumber mill villages on the east side of the Lower Pungo River was typical.

The Scranton Lumber and Land Co. sold its holdings in Hyde County in 1895, evidently after the last of the most profitable timber — the old-growth cypress, gum and juniper — had been cut. A new company, the Allegheny Lumber Co., also out of Pennsylvania, took over the operation, but itself sold out to the John L. Roper Lumber Co. sometime between 1902 and 1905.

The Roper Lumber Co. was one of the largest lumber companies in the American South. However, by 1905, its managers saw little profit in the largely deforested glades on that side of the Pungo River. Instead, the company took the bleak cutover lands that were left and began to sell them in smaller parcels.

Most were either cleared, drained, and turned into farmland or, down the road, into pine plantations.

The lumber mill on Scranton Creek shut down. About 14 or 15 miles farther down the Pungo, the company’s mill at the mouth of Slade Creek closed as well, sealing Makleyville’s fate.

The Makleyville Hotel hung on awhile, but eventually shuts its doors, too. Workers drifted away. Drummers stopped coming. Lumber barges from Baltimore were no longer seen on Slade Creek. I have not seen them myself, but I have heard that heaps of sawdust and the pilings of the mill village’s old wharf are all that is left of Makleyville.

***

Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

This is a selection of historical photographs depicting the Waccamaw Lumber Co.’s logging and lumber operations in Columbus and Brunswick counties. They date to the early 20th century, sometime, I would estimate, between 1910 and 1930.

They are now preserved, and available for the public to see, at Duke University’s David M. Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscripts Collections Library.

In my recent essay on the Italian immigrant laborers who built railroads on the North Carolina coast, I used four other photographs from that collection. You can find them here.

But I thought that quite a few of the other photographs in the collection were also worth sharing.

Incorporated in 1904, the Waccamaw Lumber Co. acquired more than 230,000 acres of land in Columbus and Brunswick counties in the first decade of the 20th century.

The company built a sprawling lumber mill in the town of Bolton, a logging camp called Makatoka, and an 18-mile-long railroad that ran into the Green Swamp.

One of the Waccamaw Lumber Co.’s train engineers, Anson Whitfield “Whit” Martin, took the photographs.

Whit Martin was born in 1883, so he was a relatively young man at that time.

To write captions for the photographs, I have relied heavily on a special edition of a local heritage journal called Kin’ Lin’. That journal was published from 1975 to 1985 by the students at Hallsboro High School, 10 miles west of Bolton.

The journal’s faculty sponsors were Mary W. Mintz and Ruby Campbell. They apparently used the journal to improve the writing and research skills of their students, as well as to deepen their students’ appreciation for Columbus County’s history and cultural heritage.

During the 1982-83 school year, Whit Martin’s widow, Bessie Burney Martin, leant the album containing her husband’s photographs to the students and faculty members who produced Kin’ Lin’.

The students then built a special edition of Kin’ Lin’ around those photographs. They discussed the photographs with a diverse group of local senior citizens who had either worked at the Waccamaw Lumber Co. or who otherwise remembered its mill and logging camp.

Those individuals were quite elderly by that time, of course. But they generously sat down with the students and answered their questions about the scenes in the photographs and their memories of the company and its workers.

A copy of that issue of Kin’ Lin’ accompanies the photographs that I studied at  Duke’s library.

You can find that issue and other issues of Kin’ Lin’ elsewhere as well, including  University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s North Carolina Collection and at many local and regional libraries across the state.

The world of lumber mills and logging camps is one of the least documented parts of North Carolina’s coastal history.

The irony, and I suppose shame, of it all, though, is of course that the photographs give us a glimpse at an almost Wild West-like society of loggers and lumbermen that we can’t help but find almost irresistibly interesting.

Yet at the same time, we can’t forget that we are also seeing the inside of a lumber industry bonanza that was sweeping across the North Carolina coast then, cutting down thousands of square miles of ancient forests and draining and burning the land until it was unrecognizable, much like what we see happening in the Amazon rain forest today.

* * *

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I recently read a fascinating Ph.D. dissertation that was completed at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2011. Written by Dr. Susan Thomas, the dissertation is titled “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935.”

I found it to be a powerful and important work of scholarship. In a series of splendidly researched chapters, Dr. Thomas’ dissertation examines the history of the largely African American chain gangs that built so many of North Carolina’s public roads in the early 20^th century.

Inspired by Dr. Thomas’ work, I requested her permission to share an excerpt of her dissertation here. To my good fortune, she graciously granted me that permission.

The excerpt that I have chosen is about a brief strike that occurred at a convict labor camp in Woodville, a rural community in Perquimans County, N.C., in April 1935.

I chose this passage because I think it gives us a rare glimpse inside a convict labor camp, but also because Dr. Thomas’s dissertation demonstrates how important prisoner protests were to reforming conditions on chain gangs in the early 20th century.

In the case of the Woodville prison camp, she chronicles how the strike played a key role in ending the practice of flogging on chain gangs and in prisons throughout North Carolina.

In our email correspondence, Dr. Thomas noted that the story “highlights the very loosely regulated county structure of the chain gangs. Each county, and sometimes each camp, had been left to do their own thing, leading to much abuse and misuse of power.”

Dr. Thomas is now a lecturer in American history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. With her permission, I have made minor edits to help make the passage work better in this format.

* * *

From Susan Thomas, “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 2011.

The trouble at the Woodville convict labor camp began in the middle of the afternoon of April 3, [1935] when prisoner James Howell stopped working and, according to later testimony, declared loudly enough for all to hear that “he was not going to work anymore, he didn’t have to work, and Capt. Jesse Johnson [the guard and camp foreman] could not make him.”

Two other men soon joined Howell in refusing to work, stating they were sick. Johnson, the guard, later claimed that Howell “sassed” him, for which he ordered him to stand next to the other men as the convicts continued working the remainder of the day.

When the chain gang returned to camp, Johnson reported the incident to camp Superintendent J. M. Tolar, who ordered Howell and the two sick prisoners to report to the camp doctor. All three prisoners refused to obey Tolar, and instead, filed into their quarters with the other men to await dinner.

Again one of the guards ordered Howell and the others to go to the doctor, but once more they refused, cursing and saying, “They had wanted [a doctor] in the afternoon, and if they couldn’t get him then, they didn’t want him at all.”

When the cook blew the supper whistle, 20 men sharing the same quarters with Howell refused to come out to eat. Tolar did not attempt to force the men out, choosing instead to try to persuade them to cooperate and avoid trouble. Seven men gave in and exited the quarters, but the remaining 13 insisted they were striking and refused to yield.

Unable to resolve the dispute that night, Tolar locked the men away. By the following morning, the number of strikers had more than doubled as they had gained sympathizers among their fellow prisoners. Now a group of 27 men refused to join the other prisoners for breakfast and began to settle in for the duration of the strike …

The Woodville camp contained 180 convicts, making it significantly larger than most others in the state. Only 27 convicts participated in the strike, leaving a sufficient number of men to carry on the work without the prisoners involved in the dispute. The superintendent might have chosen to wait the convicts out, … (but he was) determined to take control of the situation and bring an end to the strike as soon as possible, perhaps to show the remaining convicts the futility of such an action.

Realizing that he was at an impasse with the striking convicts, Tolar sent for a gas revolver and some tear gas cartridges from Sheriff Charles M. Carmine of the nearby Elizabeth City Police Department. While Tolar waited, he tried once more to talk the striking men out of the building, but the prisoners refused to listen.

According to camp officials, the strikers yelled at him and became “defiant and profane in their language.” Some of the convicts told Tolar that “they already had life terms, no one could add more time,” and that he “could not make them come out…no one could make them.”

The prisoners did agree to allow the camp’s road supervisor to enter and talk with some of the men he knew, but he reportedly found them all committed to holding out against Tolar and his armed guards.

As the situation escalated, the tear gas arrived and Tolar decided to end the standoff by driving out the strikers with the gas. To everyone’s surprise, the gas was ineffective — so much so that the striking prisoners ridiculed Tolar for the feeble attempt. There was nothing for Tolar to do but send to Elizabeth City for another tear gas gun and more gas, which Sheriff Carmine delivered personally.

By the time the sheriff arrived, the strikers had reportedly become “positively defiant and riotous.” They had broken legs from the heating stoves and from the beds to use for self-defense and to attack any guard who came close enough. They had also somehow managed to acquire a small cache of bricks, which they used as missiles whenever anyone came too close to the building.

To ensure the effectiveness of the new batch of gas, Tolar ordered his guards to go inside the stockade and close the windows. The guards attempted to obey, but they found that the prisoners were so threatening they could not gain access to the building.

Unable to seal up the stockade, Tolar then declared the area within three to four feet of the windows the “dead zone.” He ordered the guards to shoot anyone seen near the windows trying to get fresh air once gas started filling the building, but to be sure to “shoot low and not at close range.”

Tolar also warned the prisoners to stay clear of the windows or risk being shot. Emboldened by the failure of the tear gas dud and their unity of purpose, the prisoners mocked and chided the guards, telling them they “didn’t have the nerve to shoot.” Tolar then shot eight shells of tear gas into the building and waited for it to take effect.

None of the prisoners inside the stockade laughed this time. The dense fog of gas forced the strikers to enter the dead zone as they sought out the open windows, gasping for air. Seeing the convicts coming to the windows, guards complied with Tolar’s orders, shooting and wounding two convicts who tried to escape the noxious fumes by running out the door. The agitated prisoners managed to drag the wounded men back inside and threatened to attack anyone who attempted to come in and remove them, but they eventually relented and allowed guards to carry them out to the doctor. Twenty-five convicts remained inside the stockade, stubbornly refusing to give up their fight, despite the debilitating effects of the tear gas.

Around 3 o’clock that afternoon, the district prison supervisor, P.E. Mallison, arrived from Rocky Mount with more tear gas…. New to the scene and determined to end the confrontation, Mallison threatened to use the gas to drive the convicts out of the building if they chose to continue their resistance. The convicts knew they could not tolerate another bombardment of tear gas. Defeated, they filed out of the stockade, walking in pairs, hands raised above their heads in surrender.

Mallison assumed control and ordered guards to handcuff the men and detain them for questioning. Twenty-four hours after prisoner James Howell told Capt. Johnson he would not work, the first phase of the ordeal was over.

Reporters for Elizabeth City’s newspapers, The Daily Advance and The Independent, had arrived at the camp just after the shotgun wounding of the two prisoners who had tried to escape the tear gas. They were no doubt aware of the events through the participation of Elizabeth City’s sheriff in providing the two batches of tear gas Tolar used on the prisoners.

Word of the strike spread quickly, and soon [Asst. Superintendent of Prisons] L.G. Whitley … was phoning to speak with Tolar. Prison camp officials and law enforcement officers from surrounding counties, curious to find out what was happening, trickled into the Perquimans site to offer assistance and observe the situation first-hand.

Within hours of the strike’s conclusion, prison supervisor Mallison, the highest-ranking prison official on site, held an informal hearing to investigate the cause of the strike, assess guilt, and determine punishment …

After he finished interviewing the prisoners, Mallison instructed Tolar to “get the leaders and whip them if he thought it necessary to enforce discipline.” Tolar responded by selecting the 13 men he deemed most responsible for the strike, likely those who initially refused to exit their quarters for dinner.

He instructed the guards to remove the offenders to the dining area, where they ordered the convicts to strip to their underwear and lie face down on mattresses placed on the floor for the occasion. Tolar chose Pitt County’s prison camp superintendent to administer the whippings because, as he later told investigators, “He had less biases” than the men who worked in the Woodville camp.

Delegating a supposed outsider to punish the striking men was Tolar’s way of protecting himself from future reproach. Tolar later admitted allowing Johnson, the target of the strike, and another guard from the Woodville camp to participate in the whipping.

Each prisoner received from 10 to 25 lashes with a two-inch leather strap. Although witnesses, including those who had come from other camps, confirmed that the flogging drew blood out of all 13 prisoners, Tolar informed reporters that the whippings were not brutal and, as required by regulations, the camp doctor had been in attendance.

Had there only been the matter of the brief strike, the Woodville episode might have ended there. However, despite Tolar’s caution in selecting men to administer punishment, the floggings became a magnet for criticism and drew a rapid response from across the state.

Tolar’s attempt to deal with his “rebellious prisoners” by flogging sparked a round of equivocation from those in authority over the state’s prison camps. The resulting discourse exposed longstanding fence straddling that had characterized official attempts to regulate or banish flogging on both the county chain gangs and in the state penitentiary.

For the previous two decades, whenever flogging became newsworthy, the judicial system, legislature, county officials, and penal reformers addressed questions such as whether to flog prisoners, and if so, then when and how to administer the punishment and who should be in charge of it.

At several points over the years, the public understood that the legislature and even several governors had banned flogging…. Only after a questionable incident became known, as in the case of the Woodville strike, did it become clear that those who had periodically attempted to eliminate flogging and declared it illegal either had no control or had failed to enforce the purported ban.

With the unification of the penal system into a department within the state government, the debate over acceptable forms of punishment emerged once more.

State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, or SBC, files do not contain records that documented the number of floggings or the offenses that warranted the lash, but media coverage shows that throughout the 1930s prison officials were still using this method to punish prisoners.

In 1931, the same year the state created a unified penal system that included all county convicts, officials in one of Wake County’s prison camps administered a number of floggings that quickly renewed the debate over use of the lash.

The SBC and the governor established a temporary ban on flogging in September 1931 but did not settle on rules until April 1932. The regulations limited methods of punishment to reduction in grade, restricted diet, or solitary confinement. There was no mention of flogging.

As questions arose about the legality of flogging the Woodville prisoners, penal authorities began pointing fingers at one another rather than clarifying state policy.

Meanwhile, the Raleigh press reminded North Carolinians that in both 1923 and 1925, a full ten years earlier, Governor Cameron Morrison had issued an executive order forbidding whipping prisoners in the state penal system. He had acted in the wake of trials concerning mistreatment of prisoners in the county chain gangs….

Confusion surrounded the investigations [that] various state bodies launched into the strike and Tolar’s response to it. Apparently, they concluded, no one was legally accountable for the policy that enabled Tolar to order the floggings.

Before the Perquimans strike, a committee working to revise regulations for the state’s prison camps was poised to recommend the continued use of the lash. After the floggings at Perquimans, the committee reassessed its position.

The new guidelines the group submitted the week following its investigation of the strike and the floggings stipulated that there should be “no further use of corporal punishment without definite formal instructions from Raleigh before the fact.” Any prison employee violating the regulations would be subject to removal.

The penal committee intended for the new regulations to limit severely the use of corporal punishment, while providing for stricter oversight and a clear chain of command.

Some of the men who went on strike in Woodville paid a painful price for their actions, but they also accomplished the outcome for which they had hoped. By the third week of April, barely two weeks after the strike, all camp guards had resigned, including Jesse Johnson, the man the convicts had targeted….

The Elizabeth City Independent placed the story on the front page of the paper and began the article with the statement, “The effects of revolts, strikes, and rebellions are seldom fully realized until sometime after they occur.”

This reporter interpreted the guards’ resignation as a victory for the convicts, and surely for the men in the Woodville camp, this was indeed true. Through their resistance, James Howell and his fellow prisoners participated in framing the political debate over chain gang labor and helped bring the power of the state to bear on the abusive treatment they endured.

You can find the full account of the Woodville convict labor strike as well as the rest of Dr. Thomas’ dissertation, including her footnotes, online here. I want to thank Dr. Thomas again for allowing me to excerpt this part of her dissertation.

* * *

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I discovered another forgotten chapter in eastern North Carolina’s history while I was exploring the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, photographs at the Library of Congress. It is a story about the migrant farm workers that harvested the region’s crops in the 1930s and ’40s.

An FSA photographer named Jack Delano took the photographs that caught my eye. He’s the same photographer that took the photographs of the migrant construction workers at Fort Bragg that I discussed here.

A talented photographer and composer, Delano was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had come to the U.S. with his family in 1923, when he was 9 years old. All of his photographs show a warmth and sympathy for others and a special concern for the down and out.

He was one of an extraordinary group of photographers that worked for the FSA during the Great Depression and the Second World War. They included figures such as Dorothy Lange, Gordon Parks and Marion Post Walcott that are now icons in the history of documentary photography.

Delano took the photographs of migrant construction workers at Fort Bragg in March of 1941. But nine months earlier, when the FSA was still focused on the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, he had spent time with other migrant workers in a different part of eastern North Carolina.

In the summer of 1940, he took a remarkable series of photographs of the migrant laborers that harvested and packed potatoes in a group of counties not far from the Outer Banks.

Traveling up and down the East Coast, those men, women and children worked in orchards and fields from Florida to New Jersey.

In the wintertime, most worked in the citrus groves and vegetable fields of South Florida. They lived in sprawling camps of laborers in places such as Belle Meade, Immokalee and Homestead.

When they finished the harvest in Florida, they worked their way up the East Coast. The farm laborers in Delano’s photographs harvested potatoes here in North Carolina in June and July, then headed to jobs further north. Delano reported that they traveled next to Onley, a village on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and to Cranbury, a small town in southern New Jersey.

That summer of 1940, Delano photographed migrant farm workers in Shawboro in Currituck County, N.C., and in Camden, Belcross, Shiloh, and Old Trap a few miles away in Camden County, N.C.

He also photographed migrant laborers grading and packing potatoes in Elizabeth City, in Pasquotank County, N.C. That town of roughly 11,000 people had the closest freight depot to those other communities.

By 1940 migrant laborers had harvested crops in that area and in many other parts of eastern North Carolina for decades. Some had originally come from other parts of eastern North Carolina. Some came from other southern states.

Many had also come to the U.S. from at least half a dozen countries in the the Caribbean, as well as from Mexico.

Hiring migrant workers was one of the ways that farmers replaced the enslaved laborers that had harvested local crops before the Civil War.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of seasonal migrant laborers harvested crops in the U.S.

Those migrants moved across the country, one place to the next, swept up by the Great Depression as if in a great whirlwind and making do until they could get a toehold somewhere.

Today approximately 150,000 migrant farm laborers and their dependents come to North Carolina every growing season. Most were born in Mexico, though quite a few are also from Central America.

Sometimes I do not know what to make of documentary photographs. When I look at them, I feel as if I am in a dark room in a strange house and somebody has flicked a light on for just a second, then turned it back off.

It is such a brief, ephemeral look, at least in this case, of people I do not know and a place I barely know and a time that is gone.

I don’t really know who or what I am seeing, except in what I can make out in that split second of light.

Like all of us in those kinds of situations, I do the best I can: I search the lines in the faces of the people in the photographs. I look at their eyes and the way they are dressed.

I look at the color of their skin, their ages, the way they hold themselves. I look for scars on their faces and hands.

I look at the way that they look at the photographer and the way the photographer looks at them.

Of course in this case we can see that the lives of these men and women and children were hard. But without knowing more about their pasts, I do not think that I can tell if their lives as migrant laborers were harder than the lives that they left behind.

By which I mean to say something about the lives they left behind. For most of them, their earlier lives almost certainly involved sharecropping and/or field work on farms wherever they were born and in conditions that still seemed a great deal like slavery.

I suppose that, in a certain light, a life on the road could even be seen as an act of resistance, a refusal to inherit the oppressions of the past and a show of determination to escape a bondage that bound them to somebody else’s land. It could be seen as a gesture, no matter how hard a life they lived in the migrant camps, of courage and freedom.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

This is a revised version of a photo essay he published a couple years ago, based on new findings at the Library of Congress. 

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

This is an absolutely iconic photograph of life on the North Carolina coast at the turn of the 20th century. Taken in July 1909, the photograph shows a man standing in a horse-cart on Bogue Sound, east of Swansboro. He is tossing a watermelon to another man who is standing on a scow-built freight boat called the Little Jim.

A large pile of watermelons is already under a tarp on the boat’s deck. In the foreground, we can see that there are more to come.

In the distance, we can make out Bogue Banks, the long barrier island that is now, but what was not then, home to popular beach resort towns such as Atlantic Beach, Pine Knoll Shores, and Emerald Isle.

The photograph is preserved at the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh. However, I first saw the photograph in my friend Jack Dudley’s book “Swansboro: A Pictorial Tribute,” which was published back in 1998 and is unfortunately now out of print.

Jack’s book is a fascinating portrait of Swansboro and one of the very best collections of historical photographs that I have ever seen from the North Carolina coast.

I think that I like this photograph so much because it captures so poignantly the way that the boundary between farm life and maritime life was blurred for most of North Carolina’s history.

When we think of America’s maritime history, we usually think of seaports crowded with ships and shipyards, fishing fleets and busy wharves.

But most settlements in coastal North Carolina did not have a harbor nearby and were nothing like that at all. They lay on winding salt marsh creeks, quiet bays, and remote sections of sounds and rivers that were far too shallow for seagoing shipping.

Relatively small, shallow-draft boats such as the Little Jim were what was needed on those parts of the North Carolina coast.

For that reason, the scene that we see here — a boat edging onto a wharf-less shore, a horse standing in the shallows, a farmer loading his crop — could not have been more typical.

* * *

Standing in shin-deep water, the horse in the photograph has backed the cart up against the Little Jim. A local farmer is tossing watermelons one at a time into the waiting hands of the boat’s deckhand, who is placing them beneath a tarp on the boat’s deck. The captain is standing aft.

Built in Morehead City in 1897, the Little Jim was a workhorse of a boat.

According to Jack Dudley’s book, the Little Jim was originally owned by two Swansboro merchants and boatmen, first G.W. “Pete” Smith and later Capt. Jim Parkin.

She was 42 feet in length, weighed 10 gross tons, and was powered by a gasoline screw engine. She probably drew only 18 inches or a couple of feet of water.

As we can see in this photograph, the Little Jim had a classically scow-like bow and bowsprit, a small pilot house and rigging for lifting freight. A skiff is tied to the scow’s stern next to a water barrel.

I am not sure who the boat’s captain was in 1907. I did find however that two years later, she was sailed by Capt. Martin Bloodgood, a fisherman’s son from Swansboro.

As a freight hauler, the Little Jim carried a little bit of everything. Newspaper reports indicate that the boat hauled livestock, bricks, lime, barrels of salt fish, general merchandise, and, as we can see here, truck produce such as watermelons.

According to contemporary accounts, the Little Jim’s most regular run was between her homeport, Swansboro, and New Bern, a seaport that was 60 miles away by water.

The Little Jim was part of a small fleet of freight boats that connected the Swansboro area to the wider world. The connection to New Bern was especially important: Swansboro did not have a railroad in 1907; New Bern did.

Via New Bern’s rail lines, these Bogue Sound watermelons could have been purchased in the fresh markets of Baltimore or New York City a day or two later.

As I mentioned earlier, we can see Bogue Banks in the distance. In the foreground, we can see the mainland side of Bogue Sound and the edge of a tall pile of watermelons yet to be loaded onto the Little Jim.

* * *

My great-grandfather, Guy Sabiston, was a farmer in Core Creek, a rural community in Carteret County, 15 or 20 miles from Bogue Sound, when this photograph was taken.

According to my great-aunt Irene, who was one of his daughters, he took off a whole day every summer and made a special trip to Bogue Sound to buy watermelons. He drove a horse-drawn cart probably a lot like the one in this photograph.

When my great-grandfather got back to Core Creek, he shared the watermelons with his family and neighbors. To this day, the watermelons grown on the shores of Bogue Sound are famous far and wide for their sweetness.

* * *

The Little Jim traveled the backwaters of the North Carolina coast for several more years after this photograph was taken.

In 1909, she was seen hauling lime on the Trent River, south of New Bern. A year later, she was back in Swansboro with a load of general merchandise and guano. A year later, she was reported resting at the Blades Lumber Co.’s wharf in New Bern.

News reports indicate that she sank at least twice between 1910 and 1913. In 1910, she went down in a gale on the Neuse River, near the river’s inlet into Clubfoot Creek. That was not an unusual: she was raised and continued to ply local waterways.

Two years later, in 1912, she was sold to a merchant in Trenton, a village on the Trent River. She sank again later that year, apparently after hitting a snag on Swift Creek, north of New Bern.

One account indicated that the Little Jim was raised again and brought into New Bern for repairs to her hull. But another account, dated 1913, said that the boat remained on the bottom of Swift Creek. The two reports may refer to two separate sinkings.

According to the 1913 report, the Little Jim rested from her labors beneath waters not far from Vanceboro, somewhere close to the docks of the Norfolk & Southern Railway Company. Her cargo, four tons of lime, had evidently sunk with her. She may still be there to this day.

Second in a series by historian David Cecelski. Read the first installment. Coastal Review features his writings about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

In the weeks after John Lawson’s death, his “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up” crossed the Atlantic and found a new home in James Petiver’s herbarium in London. Dried and mounted, the plants remained there until Petiver’s own death of natural causes in 1718.

At that point, Lawson’s plants were purchased, along with the rest of Petiver’s collection, by Sir Hans Sloane, a friend of Petiver’s and a fellow member of the Royal Society. The Society was, and I suppose still is, England’s foremost fraternity of scientists and naturalists. Isaac Newton himself was the president of the society for many years in the early 1700s.

Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was a physician and scientist who was probably the pre-eminent collector of antiquities, exotic plant and animal specimens, and natural history curiosities in all of England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

That is saying a lot because “curiosity cabinets” and private museums that displayed objects discovered, bought or stolen during English voyages abroad were all the rage at that time.

Originally from Killyleagh, Ulster, in Northern Ireland, Sloane began his career as a collector in 1687 when he sailed to Jamaica to serve as a physician for a colonial governor.

While in Jamaica, Sloane put together a collection of 800 plant specimens, as well as collections of animal specimens and other artifacts. Recent scholarship has shown that he drew heavily on the knowledge and labor of West Africans that were slave laborers on the local sugar plantations to build his collections.

At that time, British subjects held roughly 40,000 West Africans in bondage in Jamaica, where enslaved African laborers outnumbered free whites by more than five to one. Most of the Africans were Akan people from present-day Ivory Coast and Ghana.

Enslaved Africans may also have been forced to assist John Lawson to collect the plant specimens that are now at London’s Natural History Museum.

During North Carolina’s Proprietary Era (1663-1729), Englishmen of Lawson’s class rarely traveled without the company of enslaved Africans. They routinely relied on them as guides, to pilot their boats and to supply their dinner tables, among other things.

Lawson had two enslaved Africans with him when the Tuscarora captured him and put him to death in the fall of 1711. The Tuscarora did not harm the Africans.

 The specimens that Sloane collected in the Caribbean later led to a work of natural history, a two-volume manuscript called “A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers and Jamaica.”

When he returned to London in 1689, Sloane continued to build his herbarium and other collections. He did some collecting himself, but he acquired most of his specimens by purchasing them from other collectors. As in the case of Petiver’s herbarium, he often did so after their deaths.

Sloane financed those collections with his own income, but also drew on his wife’s fortune. There, too, was yet another connection between scientific inquiry and the slave trade. The wealth of his wife, Elizabeth Langley (Rose) Sloane, was based to a large degree on her inheritance of her first husband’s sugar cane plantations in Jamaica.

Over time, Sloane’s collections filled two houses in Bloomsbury. He then moved the collections to a larger location, the manor house in Chelsea that had once been one of King Henry VIII’s residences.

Lawson’s plants still formed part of Sloane’s herbarium when he died in 1753. By that time, the herbarium had grown to include 334 volumes of plant specimens, a third of which had originally belonged to Petiver.

At Sloane’s death, his collections included, among much else, his herbarium, 1,125 “things related to the customs of ancient times,” and 50,000 books, prints and manuscripts. Those objects became the founding collections for three of Great Britain’s leading cultural institutions: the British Museum, the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

In recent years, the British Museum, the British Library and the Natural History Museum have all been embroiled in controversies concerning the relationship of their collections to Great Britain’s history of colonialism and imperialism.

Many of those controversies again highlight the ways in which scientific discovery and colonialism often went hand in hand in recent centuries.

The government of Nigeria, for instance, has formally requested that the British Museum repatriate the Benin Bronzes, an extraordinary collection of more than 900 artistic, sacred and ceremonial objects that date at least to the 16^th century. British forces took them during their pillaging and bloody occupation of Benin City in 1897.

Similarly, the Ethiopian government has formally requested the repatriation of hundreds of ancient manuscripts stolen by the British during the Battle of Maqdala in 1868. They are currently in the British Library.

Other controversies have involved the Natural History Museum.. One recent case led to the repatriation of the remains of 113 Moriori that were removed from New Zealand in the mid-19^th century.

Along with the rest of Sloane’s herbarium, Lawson’s plant specimens were housed at the British Museum when it first opened to the public in 1759. Curators later moved them and the museum’s other natural history collections to a new building a couple miles away.

That happened in 1881, when the museum that is now simply called the Natural History Museum opened in South Kensington, just a short walk from Hyde Park and a longer but quite doable stroll from Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

-To be continued-

Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

When my wife and I were in London last summer, we visited the Natural History Museum to see the collection of plants that the naturalist, explorer, surveyor and sometimes fur trader John Lawson sent to the English naturalist James Petiver in 1710 and 1711.

Lawson, himself an Englishman, collected the plants on parts of the North Carolina coast near where I grew up: by the Neuse River, by the Trent River, at Thomas Pollock’s plantation on Salmon Creek, and along the shores of the Pamlico Sound, among other sites.

The collection is a wonderful array of coastal flora, including, just to name a few, a specimen of southern live oak (Quercus virginiana),  an American persimmmon (Diospyros virginiana), a patch of Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), two kinds of sunflowers (Helianthus sp. and Eupatorium dubium), a yellow-fringed orchid (Habenaria ciliaris) and a bit of woolgrass (Scirpus cyprinus), among much else.

Many are species that Lawson wrote about in the work for which we know him best, “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

Of the live oak, for instance, Lawson wrote in “A New Voyage to Carolina” that it bears an acorn “as sweet as chesnuts (sic), and the Indians draw an oil from them, as sweet as that from the olive, tho’ of an amber colour.”

According to Vince Bellis, an esteemed botanist who taught for many years at East Carolina University in Greenville, there are 295 specimens of Lawson’s at the Natural History Museum. To my knowledge, they are the only relics of Lawson’s life that have survived to the present day.

Deep in the museum’s inner recesses, they are preserved in a simple, but effective fashion that botanists have employed for nearly 500 years: dried and pasted onto linen paper pages, now grown yellowed and brittle, and bound together.

-2-

Lawson collected the plants soon after he published “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

First appearing in London in 1709, “A New Voyage to Carolina” is by far the most important account of North Carolina’s natural history and native peoples written at any time prior to the American Revolution. Today it is widely considered a classic of early American literature.

In a way though, the path of Lawson’s plant specimens to London’s Natural History Museum began almost a decade earlier.

I think the story really begins when Lawson first settled on the North Carolina coast. That was in 1701, at a time when there were not yet any English towns or villages in the territory that the British would soon begin to call “North Carolina.”

Almost immediately, Lawson recognized the potential to do pathbreaking natural history work in his new home. No naturalist had yet done any serious collecting there. Neither had any colonist or settler yet written with any depth of knowledge about the Tuscarora, Neusiok, Coree or other native peoples who inhabited the region.

After a long journey through Carolina, and after spending much of that time in the region’s Indian towns and villages, Lawson contacted James Petiver, who was a well-known apothecary, naturalist and collector of plant and animal specimens in London.

In a letter dated April 12, 1701, now preserved at London’s Royal Society, Lawson wrote Petiver from “Bath County on Pamphrough (Pamlico) River.” In that letter, Lawson offered to collect plant specimens for Petiver, as well as shells, butterflies, fish and insects.

He told Petiver that he was willing to do so there by the Pamlico River and on a trip that he was planning to the Outer Banks.

At the time that Lawson wrote to him, Petiver was building one of the world’s great herbariums.

Beginning in 1695, Petiver published a series of booklets called, in Latin, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima Rariora Naturae Continens. They featured descriptions of plants and other specimens that had been sent to him from around the world. At the end of every volume, he encouraged readers abroad to send additional specimens to him. Lawson may have first contacted Petiver in response to that plea.

Herbaria, the singular is “herbarium,” are collections of plants kept for scientific study and teaching. Some herbaria focus just on vascular plants (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowering plants, etc.). Others feature an even more astonishing degree of botanical diversity.

The herbaria at the Natural History Museum, where Laura and I were, for instance, make up one of the world’s largest botanical collections, totaling more than 3 million specimens in all.

In addition to the General Herbarium, the museum is home to quite a few other, more specialized herbaria. There is a herbarium just for mosses and other bryophytes, another for algae, one for ferns, yet another for lichens and even ones for slime molds and diatoms.

The museum’s bryophyte herbarium alone houses 900,000 specimens, all of them tiny evolutionary descendants of what are believed to be the first terrestrial plants on Earth.

Yet another of the museum’s herbaria holds 300,000 diatoms. Resembling a pillbox and its lid (to borrow Rachel Carson’s description of them), diatoms are one-celled, microscopic organisms that, by some estimates, produce 20 to 30 percent of the air that we breathe.

Because of their hard silica shells, fossilized diatoms have also proven tremendously useful for studying changes in environmental conditions over the centuries.

Botanists have long used herbaria to advance our knowledge of plant taxonomy, the branch of science that identifies, describes, classifies, and names the world’s plants.

But in recent decades, with the advent of DNA analysis and other new  analytical tools, scientists have also begun to use herbarium specimens to study historic changes in local ecological systems and to investigate key questions about global diversity and climate change.

-3-

A physician and botanist named Luca Ghini (1490-1556) created what is believed to be the world’s first herbarium in the early 1500s, during the Italian Renaissance. A professor at the University of Bologna, he pioneered the process of preserving and displaying plants by pressing them and gluing them to a page of paper, then binding them into a book.

The earliest herbaria, including Ghini’s, were created in order to catalog, study and exhibit plants that had medicinal uses. At that time, botany was fundamentally a branch of medicine. Few scientists were interested in the study of plants if they did not have healing properties.

That soon changed, however. Over the next couple centuries, physicians and other healers, including apothecaries such as James Petiver, began to expand herbaria to include nonmedicinal plants as well as medicinal plants. The modern science of botany was born.

Luca Ghini’s herbarium has not survived, but the herbarium of one of his students, the artist and herbalist Gherardo Cibo, is believed to be the oldest extant herbarium in the world. Dating from 1532, Cibo’s herbarium is preserved at a public library in Rome, the Biblioteca Angelica.

The oldest herbarium in the United States is generally believed to be at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The Academy’s herbarium holds a wealth of specimens from the early 19^th century, including all but a few of the plant specimens that the Lewis and Clark expedition collected in 1803-06.

I should add though that at least some historians of botany consider a much smaller herbarium at Salem College, a small women’s liberal arts school in Winston-Salem, N.C., as being even older.

That herbarium—for many years occupying just a few drawers in a filing cabinet—was started in 1772, the year that Moravian settlers founded the school. However, the oldest plant specimen that remains in Salem College’s collection today is apparently a common snowberry (Symphoricarposalbus albus) that was not collected until 1817.

James Petiver’s herbarium was not one of the first herbariums, but he certainly compiled one of the largest and quite likely the most geographically diverse in early modern England.

Judging by his surviving specimens, Petiver began building his herbarium in 1683-84, while on medicinal plant collecting excursions into the London countryside that were sponsored by the Society of Apothecaries, one of the city’s trade guilds.

Petiver did not build his herbarium by traveling widely outside of Great Britain, however. He only traveled overseas once in his life, and that was not until he visited the Netherlands in 1711.

Instead Petiver relied on hundreds of correspondents around the world to send plant specimens to him. Like John Lawson, most of those correspondents were somehow connected to the colonial or imperialist aspirations of the British Empire.

From his apothecary shop, Petiver corresponded with naturalists, naval officers, ship surgeons, explorers, merchants, physicians, missionaries and an astonishing number of individuals who were involved in the trafficking of Africans to slave labor camps in the Americas.

In a 2013 journal article, Kathleen S. Murphy observed that seagoing men made up the largest number of Petiver’s correspondents in the Atlantic Basin and that nearly half of them sailed on the routes of the slave trade. See Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade, ” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 70, No. 4 (Oct. 2013).

Murphy’s article is part of a growing body of scholarship revealing how tightly even the most enlightened spirit of scientific inquiry in Great Britain was entwined with colonialism and the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Petiver’s correspondents, including those involved in the slave trade and those who were not, lived or traveled in much of the world, including Western Europe, India, China, West Africa, and the Americas.

By one count, he corresponded with at least 80 individuals just in the British colonies in North America.

Above all, Petiver cultivated relationships with that far-flung network of correspondents in the hopes that they would collect plant specimens for him, as well as share with him any knowledge they might discover about their medicinal uses.

If they proved willing to collect for him, Petiver sent detailed instructions to them on how to gather, preserve and ship the specimens so that they would arrive in London in good shape. He often sent collecting supplies and scientific instruments to his correspondents as well.

The relationship between Lawson and Petiver unfolded slowly. While Lawson first offered to collect plants for Petiver in 1701, there is no record of him having done so for another eight years.

During much of that time, Lawson was busy with matters other than the study of natural history. He was a surveyor by training. In that capacity, he laid out the colony’s first English towns.

For years, he served as the official surveyor for the Lords Proprietors, the eight Englishmen to whom King Charles II had given the lands that the English called “Carolina” to use for their own profit and gain. (They were absentee landlords; none ever set foot in the territory that is now North and South Carolina.)

Lawson also worked hand in hand with the local British colonial leaders, a motley lot that we remember today largely for their corruption, perfidy, and rapaciousness.

Some were mere penny-ante charlatans and opportunists. Others were more like Thomas Pollock, on whose lands Lawson collected quite a few specimens that are now at the Natural History Museum. Pollock was a land baron, a trafficker in African and Indian slaves and an ardent, often brutal enemy of the region’s native peoples.

I have often struggled to reconcile the heartfelt sympathy that John Lawson showed native people’s culture in “A New Voyage to Carolina” and his eagerness to serve those that did so much to threaten the survival of Native American people.

After meeting with Petiver on a return trip to London in 1709, Lawson did finally begin to send both botanical and zoological specimens to him at his shop in London.

After that meeting in London, Petiver described Lawson to a friend as “a very curious person & hath lately printed a Natural History of Carolina wherein he hath treated the Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, & Vegetables, particularly the Trees, with a great deal of Judgment & accuracy.” (Petiver to William London, 7 Sept. 1709, Sloane Papers, Royal Society Archives.)

Petiver was referring of course to Lawson’s “A New Voyage to Carolina,” which was published in London that year.

Lawson sent a first shipment of specimens to Petiver in July 1710. (They apparently included some zoological specimens that have been lost.) A year later, he sent a second package, which he described in a letter to Petiver as “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

The shipment of that second package of plants may have been Lawson’s last contribution to the field of natural history.

By the time they arrived in London, everything had changed back on the North Carolina coast. War had broken out between the Tuscarora ( or, in the language of the Tuscarora, the Skarù:ręˀ), and the English. Six or seven smaller Algonquin tribes had also joined the war on the side of the Tuscarora. Towns had been laid to waste. Many killed.

By the time his plants reached London, John Lawson was dead too, the war’s very first casualty.

The details of Lawson’s death are far from clear. The sources are few, and the sources that we do have are generally secondhand and far from trustworthy. Nevertheless, most scholars believe that Tuscarora leaders captured Lawson and sentenced him to death because of his leading role as an agent of British colonialism.

I would not be surprised if that was the case.  By the beginning of the 18th century, anyone, native or newcomer, could tell that the British were an existential threat to the region’s native peoples — and Lawson had become one of the most public faces of British colonialism.

Correspondence between Lawson and Petiver indicates that Lawson had dreamed of doing important new work in natural history. Those dreams would not be fulfilled. He left us only “A New Voyage to Carolina” and the plants now at the Natural History Museum, many of them having been in the “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

-To be continued-

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Today I am at the archives and library of the Linnean Society in London, England. Founded in 1788, the Linnean Society is the oldest biological society in the world. I am only in London for a few days, but while I am here, I cannot possibly resist visiting some of the Society’s treasures, including a letter from 1759 that I have wanted to see most my life.

The Linnean Society sits in an old and revered square in Piccadilly Circus, just down the road from Buckingham Palace, where, as I write this, tremendous crowds are gathering to mourn the Sept. 8 passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

An English botanist, Sir James Edward Smith, was the Linnean Society’s founder. The Society’s first collections were those of Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist and physician who was the Society’s namesake. After Linnaeus’s death in 1778, Smith acquired his personal library and correspondence, as well as his specimen collection of plants, insects, shells and fish, and brought them to London.

They are still at the Linnean Society today. In fact, I’m sitting just across the room from a display case that features a doting fan letter that Jean-Jacque Rousseau sent Linnaeus in 1771.

One of the leading scientific figures of the Enlightenment, Linnaeus is best known for creating the taxonomic system for naming, defining and classifying organisms that is still used by scientists today.

Examples of Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy—called “binomial nomenclature”— include Homo sapiens (meaning “wise human” in Latin) for us human beings.

Or as a less aspirational example, one of my favorite plants back home on the North Carolina coast is Ilex vomitoria, commonly known as yaupon, a species of holly with lovely red berries. (Ilex for holly and vomitoria because the coastal Algonquins used as it as a ritual purgative).

The Linnean Society holds an even more important place in the history of science for another reason: this is where Charles Darwin first publicly presented his theory of evolution and natural selection.

On July 1, 1858, here in these rooms, Darwin gave the world a first look at the theory that he would elaborate more fully 15 months later, when he published “On the Origin of Species,” arguably the most important scientific work ever published.

As I write this, I am sitting next to a display case that includes a vasculum, a collecting box for plants, that Darwin used while serving as a naturalist on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831-36.

I find it just breathtaking to be here. It’s exciting and awe inspiring and frankly heartbreaking too, because of course I can’t forget how the scientific discoveries chronicled here went hand in hand with the spread of European colonialism and unprecedented environmental devastation.

In these old manuscripts and relics, we see scientists and explorers discovering and celebrating the glories of the world’s biodiversity. But it also feels a little strange, because I can tell that they did not yet know what we know: that it is all fragile and will only last if we make it last.

If I could, I would be here all week. I would browse the great British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russell Wallace’s journals. I would also look at the Society’s rare copy of Elizabeth Blackwell’s “A Curious Herbal,” a gorgeous reference book of medicinal plants that was published here in London in weekly installments between 1737 and 1739.

Maybe I would even take a look at the seashells that were collected on James Cook’s epic voyage to the South Pacific in 1771.

But I have time to do only one thing today, and it’s why I am here. I am holding in my hand a letter from the North Carolina coast that colonial governor Arthur Dobbs wrote on April 2, 1759.

He wrote the letter to an English botanist, Peter Collinson. In that letter, he told Collinson about a tiny but amazing insectivorous plant that was only found in the moist longleaf pine savannahs and pocosin swamplands within a 90-mile radius of present-day Wilmington, North Carolina.

The description is brief, but unmistakable: “We have a kind of Catch Fly Sensitive which closes upon anything that touches it. It grows in Latitude 34 but not in 35. I will try to save the seed here.” 

The plant of course was the incredibly beautiful, utterly fascinating species now called the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula).

Few of God’s creations symbolize the place I call home more.  Few symbolize the beauty, uniqueness and fragility of our coastal wetlands more either. And, according to historians of science, this letter is the oldest and first known written record of the Venus flytrap in the history of the world.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

To my friends at The Ridge

An anthropologist named Frank Speck took this photograph of an American Indian woman and child on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 1915. He referred to them as “Machapunga Indians” (though I will not), a tribe whose homeland had historically been the area around the Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet.

I found the photograph a few days after Christmas when I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

I later learned that the original copy of the photograph is at the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia “learned society” that was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743.

Speck was a professor at Penn, just outside of Philly. He specialized in the culture and languages of the Algonquin and Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the Eastern U.S. and Canada.

At the time he visited Roanoke Island, he was probably best known for his work with Fidelia Fielding in Connecticut. She was a Mohegan Indian elder also known as Dij’ts Bud dnaca (“Flying Bird”).

Fidelia Fielding was the last fluent speaker of the Mohegan Pequot language. One of the many extraordinary things about her was that she kept diaries in the written version of Mohegan Pequot.

Entrusted to Speck after her death in 1908, those diaries later proved indispensable to preserving the written version of Mohegan Pequot and to making possible a revival of the language.

Fidelia Fielding’s diaries have since been repatriated to the Mohegan Tribe. They are now in the Mohegan Library and Archives on the Mohegan Tribe’s reservation in Uncasville, Connecticut.

In 1915 Speck toured Roanoke Island and the Outer Banks in search of American Indian people who might still speak the Carolina dialect of the Algonquin language.

In an article in American Anthropologist the next year, he proclaimed his findings “meager.” To me, at least, he does not seem to have understood much of what he saw or heard, but he was right about the language: Carolina Algonquin, as linguists call it, was extinct.

-2-

Though Frank Speck’s article in American Anthropologist did not impress me, I was enthralled by the copies of his photographs that I found at the National Museum of the American Indian.

There are a total of five: the photograph I have shown you already, two more of the same woman and child (taken at the same time, and in roughly the same pose) and two others.

The two others are portraits of a much older Indian/African American woman who was apparently from the same family as the woman and child: a mother, grandmother or great-grandmother, perhaps.

In the American Anthropologist, Speck identified all three figures as part African American and part “Machapunga Indian.” In fact, he called his article “Remnants of the Machapunga Indians in North Carolina.”

That seems a little strange because the two women and the child identified as American Indian, but did not use the word “Machapunga” to describe their tribal background. In fact, it’s not clear that any of the coastal tribes ever referred to themselves as the “Machapunga.”

In the early 1700s, English colonists did use the word “Machapunga” to describe the Algonquin-speaking Indians that resided in the vicinity of the Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet.

The Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet are both located southwest of Roanoke Island—the river perhaps 50 miles southwest, the lake 30 miles southwest.

The English used the word “Machapunga” in the early 1700s, but earlier accounts refer to the Algonquin-speaking Indians on that part of the North Carolina coast as the “Secotan.”

Later accounts, on the other hand, often employ more local terms, such as “Pungo River Indians” or “Mattamuskeet Indians.”

The only translation of the word “Machapunga” from the Algonquin to English that I have seen indicates that it means “bad dust” or “much dirt.” If that is correct, that does not sound like what a people would call themselves.

For those reasons, I think it is possible that “Machapunga” was what geographers call an exonym—a name, often but not always pejorative, that outsiders use to describe a place or a people, but one that the people in that place do not use.

-3-

Frank Speck did not identify the younger Indian woman or the young girl in his Roanoke Island photographs by name. However, he did identify (a bit incorrectly, it turns out) the older woman in his photographs as “Mrs. M. H. Pugh.”

“Mrs. M. H. Pugh” was Annie Mariah (Simmons) Pugh, and her late husband’s name was not M. H. Pugh, but Smith Pugh. (M. H. Pugh was one of their sons.)

With a little genealogical research, I discovered that Annie Mariah Simmons (later Pugh) was born on the Pungo River, not far from the present-day towns of Belhaven and Pantego.

In his article in American Anthropologist, Speck confirms my findings. He says that she “was born and raised in the Pungo River district” and referred to herself as a “Pungo River Indian.”

The place of her birth was an important one in the history of Native America. One of the first encounters between American Indians and the English occurred on the Pungo River in the 1500s.

In the summer 1585, an English reconnaissance party explored the region around the Pungo River. While there, they visited a village called Aguascogoc twice.

On the first visit, the English traded with the people of Aguascogoc. But on the second visit, the English burned the village to the ground and torched its croplands.

To my knowledge, Aguascogoc was the first Indian village that the English destroyed anywhere in North America.

-4-

When Frank Speck visited Annie Pugh on Roanoke Island in 1915, he estimated “her age to be about eighty years.” That seems to have been correct. According to census records, she was born in 1838 so she was 77 years old at that time.

At the age of 17, she married Smith Pugh, a Hatteras Island Indian who made his living at times by going to sea, but mainly by fishing and probably doing a little farming, too.

Like many of the old Outer Banks families, he had a multiracial background, as did Annie. (By “multiracial, I mean some combination of European, African and/or Native American ancestry.)

Both identified however as Indian (though not necessarily only Indian): she, as I mentioned, as a “Pungo River Indian,” and Smith as a member of the Hatteras Island tribe.

Smith and Annie Pugh moved closer to his home on Hatteras Island sometime after the Civil War and had a family of 13 children, though only eight seem to have survived to adulthood.

The identification of their and their children’s races in the federal censuses that were done every 10 years reflects the family’s multiracial identity and the way that America looked at race in that day.

Between the Civil War and 1900, federal censuses listed the race of the Pughs and their children at times as “mulatto,” at times as “white” and at times as “black.”

The censuses never listed any of them as “Indian,” “American Indian” or “Native American,” however.

Those were not really options at that time. Prior to 1900, the federal census counted few native people anywhere in the United States.

That exclusion had deep historical roots: as hard as it is to imagine, the United States Constitution specifically prohibited Native Americans from becoming U.S. citizens. That did not change until 1924, when the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act.

If a census taker identified an individual as part-Indian, part-white or part-Black (or part any other race) and decided to count them, they typically listed that person as being a race other than American Indian.

-5-

The Pughs were a fishing family. They lived mainly on the Outer Banks, and Smith Pugh and his and Annie’s three sons were all fishermen. It was a poor man’s existence: the children had little, if any, time for schooling and the boys often began working on the water by the time that they were 11 or 12.

The 1880 federal census, for instance, already lists their 12-year-old son Melton as a fisherman.

Fishing was a hard life, but had its advantages, too. If you were descended from the coastal Algonquins, one of those advantages may have been having a sense of connection to one’s ancestors. After all, American Indians had been fishing on those waters for thousands of years.

That same 1880 census lists Annie Pugh as “keeping house.” In a fisherman’s family of at least eight children, “keeping house” was of course no small job. Annie probably rose earlier and stayed up later than anyone else in the household and was surely a stranger to idle hands.

Annie’s husband, Smith Pugh, died sometime around 1900. Frank Speck, our anthropologist from Penn, met Annie Pugh 15 years later, the year before she died. She passed in Nags Head, on Bodie Island, in 1916.

The identities of the woman and child in the other photographs remain a mystery. Mostly likely the adult woman was Annie Pugh’s daughter, granddaughter, or great-granddaughter. The girl, I assume, was the unidentified woman’s daughter.

Whoever the mother and daughter in that photograph were, I love their poise and fearlessness and how they are looking at the stranger who is taking their photograph.

There is something about their unabashed gazes that I just find incredibly compelling. They both seem to know exactly who they are, and they both seem to be looking straight into Speck’s soul.

Maybe it is my imagination, but the mother, at least, seems a bit skeptical of what she sees there, though perhaps she was just skeptical of why he was there at all.

-6-

Annie Pugh’s ties to the Pungo River Indians reminded me of a story that I heard some time ago. That was in 2004, when I was in Wenona, a rural community a little north of the Pungo River and just west of what is now the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

I was in Wenona to do an oral history interview with an 88-year-old white woman named Rachel Stotesbury.

Mrs. Stotesbury had lived in Wenona since she married a local farmer in the 1930s. (You can find the story I wrote about her here.)

During my visit, Mrs. Stotesbury told me that her father-in-law remembered when a band of Indians still lived in the headwaters of the Pungo River.

According to Mrs. Stotesbury’s father-in-law, the Indian settlement was located at a place called Davis Landing, which at that time was in a remote, roadless tract of swamp forest in the headwaters of the Pungo River, perhaps 20 miles upstream of Annie Pugh’s childhood home.

In those days, the headwaters of the Pungo River still lay in the heart of what was called the Dismal Swamp (or sometimes, the “East Dismal Swamp,” to distinguish it from the Great Dismal Swamp on the other side of the Albemarle Sound).

Even at the end of the 19^th century, the East Dismal Swamp (as I’ll call it) still covered hundreds of square miles: it was a seemingly endless sea of ancient cypress forests, juniper stands and pocosin wilderness.

Pocosin is an Algonquin word for a distinctive type of raised peat bog that is only found in southeast Virginia and on the coastal plains of North and South Carolina.

But in the late 1800s, timber companies began moving into the East Dismal in a big way. They dug massive canals, drained the swamps and cut down every last acre of the old-growth forests.

They also built the region’s first railroads. Along the new rails, they hauled the swamp’s massive logs to lumber mills in company towns built on the edge of the swamplands. The Roper Lumber Company built the largest mills, one in the town of Roper, the other in the town of Belhaven.

After the forest was gone, the timber companies sold the land to be used for farming. And as the East Dismal vanished, so did the native peoples, at least the ones at Davis Landing.

-7-

Frank Speck’s photographs at the National Museum of the American Indian also reminded me of a place dear to my heart.

Ten or 15 miles east of the Pungo River, my family and I often visit a friend who is descended from the Algonquin Indians that have lived so long on that part of the North Carolina coast. She lives in a community on the edge of Lake Mattamuskeet where many of her neighbors are also the descendants of those tribes.

My family and I like to go there particularly this time of year, when the great flocks of snow geese and tundra swans have come down from the far north and made the lake their winter home.

The community’s roots go back to the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715, when the Algonquin tribes that lived in the vicinity of the Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet joined forces with the Tuscarora and several other Algonquin tribes to wage war against the English colonists.

When they fell in defeat, some of the survivors retreated into the East Dismal Swamp and into the swamplands along the Alligator River.

They refused to surrender, and one colonial leader complained that they were “expert watermen” and could not easily be tracked.

In 1727 English leaders carved out a reservation for them on lands running from Lake Mattamuskeet and the present-day town of Engelhard south to Wysocking Bay.

Other Tuscarora War refugees apparently joined them on the reservation lands at Lake Mattamuskeet —a few Coree at first, and later a small number of Indians from Hatteras Island and Roanoke Island.

The Mattamuskeet Indian Reservation did not last long, however. The last of the reservation’s lands was sold to non-natives in 1761.

Nevertheless, many of the reservation’s families clung to Lake Mattamuskeet and the waters of the Pamlico Sound. Many remain there to this day. And as I come to appreciate more every time I visit, they are part of a strong, loving and giving community with roots in that land that go back thousands of years.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review is sharing this work by historian David Cecelski in recognition of Black History Month.

Whenever I pass the old clam house between Smyrna and Williston, I glance east across Jarrett Bay to Davis Ridge. You will go that way if you drive Highway 70 across the broad salt marshes of Carteret County, to catch the Cedar Island ferry to the Outer Banks.

Most passersby admire the beautiful vistas across Core Sound and look for the wild ponies grazing in the Cape Lookout National Seashore and the Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge. Some travelers wander through the old seaside villages, such as Harkers Island, that are renowned for their boatbuilding, fishing and seafaring heritage.

Few coastal visitors know that the secluded hammock of Davis Ridge was once home to an extraordinary community founded by liberated slaves.

Nobody has lived at “the Ridge” since 1933, yet the legend of those African American fishermen, whalers and boatbuilders still echoes among the elderly people in the maritime communities between North River and Cedar Island that locals call Down East.

This essay appeared in my book “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina” (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). It was originally a lecture at a conference on race, power and ethnicity in maritime America that was held at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. Earlier versions of the essay appeared in Coastwatch magazine and Sea History.

At the North Carolina Maritime Museum

I had heard of Davis Ridge when I was growing up 25 miles to the west. When I became a historian, I searched for the history of those Black Down Easterners with much ardor and little success.

For a long time, I assumed all record of them had been lost. I found no trace of Davis Ridge in history books. Exploring the Ridge by boat and on foot, I uncovered only an old cemetery in a live oak grove surrounded by salt marsh and, only a few yards away, Core Sound and Jarrett Bay.

All the documents that I examined in research libraries, archives and museums yielded only tantalizing clues to the community’s past. The best sources I could find were a few, mostly secondhand recollections from elderly people who had grown up in fishing villages not far from Davis Ridge.

At last, after I had given up I stumbled upon a tape-recorded interview with Nannie Davis Ward in a storage pantry at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

Most success in historical research comes from persistence and hard work. Finding Ward’s interview was an undeserved act of grace.

Folklorists Michael and Debbie Luster had interviewed Ward in 1988 only a few years before her death. At that time, Ward was apparently the last living soul to have grown up at Davis Ridge.

A retired seamstress and cook, she was born at the Ridge in 1911. Ward was blind by the time the Lusters interviewed her, but she had a strong memory and a firm voice. Listening to her eloquent words, I found a vivid portrait of her childhood home taking shape in my mind. Her story fills an important part of the history of the African American maritime people who inhabited the coastal villages and fishing camps of North Carolina before the Civil War.

It is a story of only one community, Davis Ridge, but it speaks to the broader experience of the Black watermen and women who came out of slavery and continued to work on the water.

Black maritime traditions before the Civil War

When Nannie Davis Ward was a child, Davis Ridge was an all-Black community on a wooded knoll, or small island, on the eastern shore of Jarrett Bay, not far from Core Sound and Cape Lookout. A great salt marsh separated the Ridge from the mainland to the north, which was known as Davis Shore. Davis Island was just to the south. A hurricane cut a channel between Davis Ridge and Davis Island in 1899, but in her grandparents’ day it had been possible to walk from one to the other.

The founders of Davis Ridge had been among many slave watermen and women at Core Sound before the Civil War. Ward’s family was in many ways typical of the African American families along the Lower Banks. They were skilled maritime laborers with a seafaring heritage. They had 18^th century family roots in the West Indies and had Black, white and Native American ancestry. They moved seasonally from fishery to fishery, working on inshore waters, rarely the open sea.

They also had a history of slave resistance. Nannie Davis Ward’s mother, who identified herself as Native American, had grown up in Bogue Banks, a 26-mile-long barrier island west of Beaufort, and her mother’s grandfather had evidently been a slave aboard a French sailing vessel. According to Ward, that great-grandfather had escaped from his French master while in port at New Bern and had been raised free in the family of a white waterman at Harkers Island, 10 miles west of Davis Ridge.

It was Sutton Davis, Ward’s paternal grandfather, who first settled Davis Ridge. As a slave, Sutton Davis had belonged to a small planter and shipbuilder named Nathan Davis at Davis Island. Sutton Davis had been a master boatbuilder and carpenter. According to his granddaughter, he had learned the boatbuilding trade at a Wilmington shipyard owned by a member of the white Davis family and then moved back to Davis Island.

Family lore on one side of the white Davis family holds that Nathan was Sutton’s father. Nannie Davis Ward did not address that question in her interview, except to note that Sutton and his children were very light skinned.

A voyage to freedom

When Union troops captured Beaufort and New Bern in 1862, Sutton Davis led the Davis Island slaves to freedom. They rowed a small boat across Jarrett Bay to the fishing village of Smyrna, from where they fled to Union-occupied territory on the outskirts of New Bern.

After the war, some of those former enslaved people founded the North River community, a few miles outside of Beaufort, but Sutton Davis bought 4 acres at Davis Ridge in 1865. Nathan Davis sold him the property for the sort of low price usually reserved for family. Sutton Davis and his children eventually acquired 220 more acres at Davis Ridge.

The number of Black Down Easterners declined sharply after the Civil War, but Davis Ridge remained a stronghold of the African American maritime culture that had thrived along Core Sound. Nearly all of Nannie Davis Ward’s relatives worked on the water. Her grandfather Sutton, of course, was a fisherman and boatbuilder. Her mother’s father, a free Black man named Samuel Windsor, became a legendary fisherman and whaler at Shackleford Banks, the 9-mile-long barrier island just east of Beaufort. Sam Windsor’s Lump is still marked on nautical charts of Shackleford.

Her father, Elijah, owned a fish house. Her great-uncle Palmer was a seafarer and sharpie captain. Her great-uncle Adrian was a captain of the fishing boat Belford. Another great-uncle, Proctor, was a waterman who lived at Quinine Point, the northwest corner of Davis Ridge.

Many other kinsmen became stalwarts in the Beaufort menhaden fleet, which rose in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to become the state’s most important saltwater fishery. During its heyday, Black watermen dominated the menhaden fishery, which had Black leadership earlier than any other local industry. Out of Nannie Davis Ward’s family came the menhaden industry’s first African American captains.

Saltwater farmers

Sutton Davis and his 13 children operated one of the first successful menhaden factories in North Carolina, long before the industry’s boom in Beaufort. Sutton built two fishing schooners, the Mary E. Reeves and the Shamrock. His sons worked the boats while his daughters dried and pressed the menhaden — known locally as “shad” or “pogie” — to sell as fertilizer and oil.

“Men should have been doing it,” Ward explained, “but he didn’t have them there, so the girls had to fill in for them.”

In fact, Ward pointed out, at Davis Ridge, “The girls did a lot of farm working, factory work too.”

The Black families at Davis Ridge were what local historian Norman Gillikin in Smyrna calls “saltwater farmers”: the old-time Down Easterners who lived by both fishing and farming. They hawked oysters across Jarrett Bay and raised hogs, sheep and cattle. They grew corn for the animals and sweet “roasting ears” for themselves. At night they spun homegrown cotton into cloth.

Their gardens were full of collard greens and, as Ward recalled vividly, “sweet potatoes as big as your head.” They worked hard and prospered.

Sometimes Sutton Davis augmented his children’s labor by hiring fishing hands from Craven Corner, an African American community 30 miles west. Craven Corner had been settled in the 18^th century by free Blacks that had migrated south out of Virginia. According to local oral tradition, many had intermarried with the descendants of the Native American survivors of the Tuscarora War of 1711-13. Over the generations, African Americans at Craven Corner had earned a strong reputation for a fierce independence and for being excellent watermen and artisans.

One does not have to stretch one’s imagination to see them fitting into the fishing life at Davis Ridge.

Davis Ridge was a proud, independent community. When Nannie Ward was growing up there in the 1910s and 1920s, seven families — all kin to Sutton Davis — still lived at the Ridge. They sailed across Jarrett Bay to a Smyrna gristmill to grind their corn and to a Williston grocery to barter fish for coffee and sugar, but mainly relied on their own land and labor.

They conducted business with their white neighbors at Davis Shore or across Jarrett Bay by barter and by trading chores. “You didn’t know what it was to pay bills,” Ward reminisced.

Island women

While the Davis Ridge men worked away at Core Banks mullet camps or chased menhaden into Virginia waters, the island women cared for farms and homes. They gathered tansy, sassafras and other wild herbs for medicines and seasoning. Thy collected yaupon leaves in February, chopped them into small pieces and dried them to make tea.

In May, they sheared the sheep. Nannie Ward’s grandmother spun and wove the wool. They produced, Ward explained, “everything they used.”

Davis Ridge was a remote hammock, but Ward could not remember a day of loneliness or boredom. She told how two Beaufort menhaden fishermen, William Henry Fulcher and John Henry, used to visit and play music on her front porch.

“We enjoyed ourselves on the island,” Ward said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of things to do, but we enjoyed people. We visited each other.”

The camaraderie of Black and white neighbors around Davis Ridge was still striking to Nannie Ward a century later. For most Blacks in coastal North Carolina, the 1910s and 1920s were years of hardship and fear. White citizens enforced racial segregation at gunpoint. Blacks who tried to climb “above their place” invited harsh reprisals. The Ku Klux Klan marched by the hundreds in coastal communities as nearby as Morehead City, and word went out in several fishing communities — including Knotts Island, Stumpy Point and Atlantic — that a Black man might not live long if he lingered after dark.

Davis Ridge was somehow different. Black and white families often worked, socialized and worshiped together. “The people from Williston would come over to our island,” Ward said of school recitals and plays, “and we’d go over to their place.”

Sutton Davis’s home, in particular, was a popular meeting place. Hymn singers of both races visited his home at Davis Ridge to enjoy good company and the finest pipe organ around Jarrett Bay.

Ward even recalled a white midwife staying with Black families at Davis Ridge when a child was about to be born, a simple act of kindness and duty that turned racial conventions of the day upside down. This may seem a trivial thing, but it was quite the opposite.

A coastal midwife had to move into an expectant mother’s home well before her due date or risk not being in attendance at the birth because of the time required to travel to and from the islands. The midwife stayed for the child’s birth and then tended to mother and child — and sometimes the cooking and housework — until the mother was recovered fully. Taking care of those duties, a midwife could easily spend two or three weeks living in the mother’s household.

In the American South during the era of Jim Crow, it was not unusual at all for a Black midwife to serve a white family in that capacity. The arrangement was entirely consistent with a traditional role of Black women serving as maids and nannies in white homes.

But to reverse the arrangement was unheard of. The white South simply did not allow one of its own to serve a Black woman. Even more fundamental to the complex racial landscape of the day, a white woman could never stay the night under a Black man’s roof, that being a breech of the sexual code that was at the heart of Jim Crow.

The daily conduct of Blacks and whites at Davis Ridge would have caused riots, lynchings or banishment in most southern places, including coastal towns 20 miles away.

Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white ministers across the American South lost their jobs for inviting Black choirs to sing at a church revival. Yet the Davis Ridge choir sang at revivals at the Missionary Baptist church at Davis Shore two generations before the civil rights movement.

An old legend even tells how, in 1871, Black and white worshipers rushed from a prayer meeting and together made a daring rescue of the crew and cargo of a ship, the Pontiac, shipwrecked at Cape Lookout.

Mullet camps

The work culture of mullet fishing on the barrier islands near Davis Ridge both reflected and reinforced this blurring of conventional racial lines. Every autumn all or most of the Davis Ridge men joined interracial mulleting gangs of four to 30 men tending seines, gill nets and dragnets along the beaches between Ocracoke Island and Bogue Banks.

During the 1870s and 1880s, that stretch of coastline supported the largest mullet fishery in the U.S. More than 30 vessels carried the salted fish out of Beaufort and Morehead City, and the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad transported such large quantities that for generations local people referred to it as the “Old Mullet Road.”

Out on those remote islands, Black and white mullet fishermen lived, dined and worked together all autumn, temporarily sharing a life beyond the pale of the stricter racial barriers ashore. They worked side by side, handling sails and hauling nets, and every man’s gain depended on his crew’s collective sailing and fishing skills.

For most, a lot was riding on the mullet season. Local fisherman were a hand-to-mouth lot, and mulleting was one of the few fisheries that promised barter for flour, cornmeal and other staples necessary to fill a winter pantry, to say nothing of putting aside a little for Christmas or a bolt of calico that might save their wives a fortnight of late night weaving.

Every fisherman hoped for the strongest crew possible, and nobody worked the mullet nets or knew how to survive the vicious storms on the barrier islands better than the men from Davis Ridge. On those secluded shores, away from the prying eyes of the magistrates of Jim Crow, a man’s race might start to seem a little less important.

Work customs reflected this camaraderie and interdependence. Mullet fishermen traditionally worked on a “share system,” granting equal parts of their catch’s profits to every hand, no matter his race. Owners of boats and nets earned extra shares. Often they also voted by shares to settle work-related decisions. These were the sort of working conditions that might attract even the independent-minded souls of Davis Ridge to work alongside their white counterparts.

This fraternity of Black and white fishermen on the islands off Davis Ridge comes across clearly in a stunning engraving of a mulleting gang at Shackleford Banks. The original photograph on which the engraving as based was taken in about 1880 by R. Edward Earll, a fishery biologist who visited the local mulleting beaches as part of the U.S. Fish Commission’s monumental survey of all of the nation’s fisheries.

Look closely at the engraving and what stands out immediately are the equal numbers of Black and white fishermen, their intermingled pose, their close quarters, their obvious familiarity — one might even say chumminess — and the unclear lines of authority. All were entirely foreign to the standard racial attitudes of the American South in that day.

I find it one of the most extraordinary images ever made of life in the Jim Crow era. One never sees anything close to that intimacy and equality in the portraits of Black and white workers in cotton mills, lumber caps, coal mines or agricultural fields, much less in the trades or professions.

The notion of Blacks and whites sharing a fish camp whose design was inspired by a West African architectural tradition (see my book “The Waterman’s Song,” pages 78 and 248-49) stretches the imagination even farther.

A mullet fisherman from Davis Ridge may, in fact, have built the camp in this engraving. Sallie Salter, a white woman who lived near the Ridge from 1805 to 1903, recalled for her grandson that Proctor Davis “lived in a rush camp” at Davis Ridge and later moved closer to her family at Salter Creek “and built another rush camp, and lived in it for a long time.”

After dark

One must be careful not to exaggerate the racial harmony around Davis Ridge. Not a crossroads in the American South escaped the reality of racial oppression. Certainly Davis Ridge did not. After the statewide white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900, local whites fostered an atmosphere of racial intimidation that increasingly drove African Americans out of Down East, as well as discouraged any new Black settlement in the villages east of North River.

For years, a hand-scrawled sign at the town limits of Atlantic, 15 nautical miles from Davis Ridge, read: “No Niggers after Dark.”

Even when I was a young boy, no Blacks lived anywhere Down East, and I often heard the admonition that African Americans could work in the Down East clam houses or oyster shucking sheds during the day but could never spend the night safely.

Once, on a club field trip to one of my teachers’ homes at Harkers Island, the teacher — a native of Down East — had the one African American girl in the club lay on the floor of her car as soon as she drove over the North River Bridge. My teacher did not have to explain why.

Seen in this light, Davis Ridge was an island in more than one sense: As the rest of Down East grew whiter and whiter after the Civil War, this remote knoll was increasingly seen as a last redoubt of African American independence and self-sufficiency. White fishermen could look across Jarrett Bay and refer to the Mary E. Reeves or the Shamrock as “the nigger boats,” as I have heard Down East old timers call them, but Sutton Davis’s clan still had two of the only menhaden boats Down East and the skills to make good money with them.

So many good things

That was the heart of the matter. Sutton Davis and his descendants could not remove themselves from the white supremacy pervasive in the American South but they had at least two advantages that most Black southerners could only dream of: land and a fair chance to make a living.

And, unlike the rest of the Jim Crow South, the broad waters of Core Sound could not so easily be segregated into separate and unequal sections. Self-reliant, in peonage to no one, the African Americans at Davis Ridge joined their white neighbors as rough equals in a common struggle to make a living from the sea.

Ward left Davis Ridge in 1925. She first went to Beaufort to attend high school, and then she moved to South Carolina and New York. While she was gone, the great 1933 hurricane laid waste to the island’s homes and fields. The Ridge was deserted when she returned in 1951. No African Americans resided anywhere Down East by that time.

“I still loved the island,” Ward told the Lusters only a few years before she died in Beaufort. “When you grow up there from a child, you learn all the things in the island, you learn how to survive. You learn everything.”

I heard a low, wistful sigh and a deep yearning in her voice. “We were surrounded by so many good things that I don’t get anymore, that I never did get again.” I knew that she was not speaking merely of roast mullet and fresh figs.

She was silent a moment. Then, with a laugh, she exclaimed, “I’d like to be there right now.”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Editor’s note: Coastal Review is sharing this work by historian David Cecelski in recognition of Black History Month.

When I was at Oberlin College last summer, I stopped by the library so that I could look at the letters that the Rev. Elam J. Comings and his daughter Sarah wrote when they were in Beaufort during the Civil War.

I was interested in Elam and Sarah Comings’ letters because they were written in 1863-64, when they were teachers at the Whipple School, an American Missionary Association, or AMA, school in Beaufort. Most of their students were African Americans who were slave laborers until Union forces captured the town and liberated them in 1862.

When Elam and Sarah arrived in Beaufort, the vast majority of North Carolina remained in Confederate hands. Slavery was of course still the law of the land in that section of the state.

Things were different in Beaufort, New Bern and a few other coastal towns, however. Held by the Union Army, they made up a narrow sliver of the North Carolina coast where African Americans could come out of the shadow of slavery.

By the fall of 1863, Beaufort was busting at the seams. The little seaside town was overflowing with escaped and liberated slaves. Confederate deserters were everywhere. Throngs of Union sailors and soldiers (including many who were Black) and sick and wounded soldiers (a Union Army hospital was there) crowded the town’s old oyster shell and sand streets. Smugglers, shysters and war profiteers, of every loyalty, abounded.

Originally from Vermont, Rev. Comings had graduated from Oberlin College in 1838 and had been ordained there in 1841. He was at Oberlin at an extraordinary moment in the college’s history. In 1835, Oberlin admitted its first Black students, becoming one of the first colleges in the U.S. to do so.

To put that in perspective, I might note that was 116 years before the University of North Carolina admitted its first Black students.

Two years later, in 1837, Oberlin admitted women students for the first time, becoming the first coeducational college in the U.S. At the same time, the town of Oberlin was becoming a hotbed of anti-slavery activism.

To what degree Oberlin shaped Rev. Comings’ views on slavery, I do not know. But after finishing at the college’s seminary, his first pastorate was in Frederickstown, Ohio, where proponents of slavery attempted to blow up and burn his church because of his and his congregation’s anti-slavery views.

The Rev. Comings’ abolitionist beliefs also led him to Beaufort. In his and Sarah’s letters, we get a glimpse of wartime Beaufort and of a local history of Afro-Christianity that had defied slavery long before the Civil War.

We also get a fascinating look at the two missionaries, Elam and Sarah, their commitment to African American freedom and education, and also the limits of their commitment to racial equality.

These are some of the notes that I made as I read Elam and Sarah Comings’ letters at Oberlin College.

* * *

Rev. Comings to his wife Fanny, Nov. 6, 1863

He has left their home in East Berkshire, Vermont. On route to North Carolina, he learns where the American Missionary Association has assigned him. “I am to teach in Beaufort.”

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Nov 12, 1863

He and their daughter Sarah are in New Bern, 35 miles up the railroad line from Beaufort. They will take the train to Morehead City, then a ferry to Beaufort in the next day or two.

Rev. Comings to “my dear wife,” Nov. 16, 1863

He describes his first visit to one of Beaufort’s African American schools. The school is held in a local church, probably Purvis Chapel.

“As I entered the Ch(urch), I saw 150 (illegible) of all ages each with some book primer … And a few with scripture … books all eagerly trying to spell out the words. A few …could read the testament.” He notes: “The teachers were all blacks but a short time out of slavery.”

He also makes this observation with respect to the African American women that he meets in Beaufort:

“The women look as tho they have suffered (under slavery) by far more than the men. They look abject … and dejected … The great day will reveal many a story of shame and sorrow through which they have past. (sic). ”

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza (their other daughter), Nov. 24, 1863

He describes a pastoral visit to a dying man in Beaufort. “He was a poor slave, and leaves two little children and a wife.”

He also reports that his students will largely be African Americans who had recently escaped from slavery, but he expects some white children, too. He mentions that some white adults have already showed up at the school’s night classes.

“Some 7 or 8 North Carolina white soldiers came to our evening schools to learn enough to write their names. They are deserted from the Rebels. They come in here on an average of about 10 per day(,) take the oath and join the Union army.”

Rev. Comings to “my dear wife” and Eliza, Nov. 23, 1863

He begins to realize how little he knows about the African American faith and spirituality during slavery. The Whipple School now has 235 students, but he is surprised how well the former slaves already know Scripture.

“It is a puzzle to me to see how they have got hold of the Bible so much, when never allowed to learn to read till they were free.”

Sarah Comings to “ma and sis,” Nov. 26, 1863

“The colored people are very kind to us and make us presents of apples, fish and other little gifts.” She reports that she picked flowers at Fort Macon and collected seashells at Cape Lookout.

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza, Nov. 28, 1863

He is not accustomed to the coastal landscape. Everything is new to him: “Back of our house is a pretty grove of what they call ‘Live Oaks.’”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Nov. 29, 1863

He presides at a funeral for the African American man he visited on Nov. 24. The funeral is held at a local home. The service begins with the kind of solemnity with which he is accustomed, but he is surprised when the mourners begin “singing, shouting, stamping and clapping.” He writes, apparently somewhat taken aback, “It was a joyful time to them.”

He recalled, “As I came down from the pulpit one great stout man got hold of my hand and squeezed it till it ached … and fairly lifted me up saying ‘Oh Brother I am happy, my soul is full!”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Dec. 11, 1863

He describes where the AMA missionaries stay in Beaufort. “We live in an academy or boarding school building. In the basement story is a kitchen where we take our meals; the next floor above is a large school room now occupied by a school of the ‘poor white trash’ as they are here called, taught just now by a Mrs. Etheridge from Pa. In the next story are sleeping rooms … We have at present in our family 8 teachers including myself … The teachers work very hard in school and have little strength for anything else. I have an evening school 5 nights in the week for young men.”

Rev. Comings to “my dear fellow pilgrims,” Jan. 18, 1864

He has visited Newport, a village 10 miles west of Beaufort: “it has 6 stores … There is one hotel or boarding house containing two sleeping rooms, besides those occupied by the family. One blacksmith shop, one schoolhouse and there will soon be another when I get mine done for the blacks. There is also one stable large enough to contain two mules … On Broadway there are a good many houses, I guess nearly a dozen. And one of them is two stories high.”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Jan. 24, 1864

He tells Fanny and Eliza that the former slaves in Beaufort are struggling to find housing. As they pour into town, they are bedding down in attics, hallways, porches and sheds.

He also reports a growing number of the sick. “For the last 3 weeks or so, our teachers have been strangely ill. This has made me anxious.” Sarah has also been ill.

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza, Jan. 30, 1864

The Rev. Horace James, the Union army’s Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, is visiting Beaufort. His wife is with him. According to the Rev. Comings, he and Horace James “regret that Mrs. James considers it `an impropriety’ to eat in a negro’s house.”

Mrs. James was far from unusual. Despite their anti-slavery beliefs, the northerners in wartime Beaufort — soldiers, civilians and missionaries — typically shared a sense of white superiority and Black inferiority.

Racial prejudice abounded. In his letters, Rev. Comings, for instance, occasionally referred to African Americans as “darkies.” Likewise, Sarah was genuinely committed to her Black students, but she also compared them to monkeys. Both referred to Black men and women in childlike terms.

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Feb. 8, 1864

He reports that Rebel troops attacked the Union outpost in Newport. He and Sarah fear the fate of a regiment from their home state, the 9^th Vermont Infantry, that was stationed there.

The Vermonters retreated to Beaufort. “Some 25 sons of Vermont there fell killed and wounded on the first day … Seven wounded men are brought to our hospital here. I attended the funeral of one of them yesterday …There are more than 200, mostly women and children, thrown upon us … I have been obliged to take Sarah’s school room for them to occupy till the storm is past …”

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Feb. 29, 1864

Rumors of 40,000 rebel troops massing near New Bern have reached Beaufort. The town is in a panic. If New Bern falls, Beaufort would likely be next. (New Bern does not fall).

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Mar. 15, 1864

He seems beleaguered and worn out. He thinks he is “called” to return shortly to Vermont. “You think a great deal today no doubt of the deep waters through which we have past (sic),” he tells his wife.

He gives few details about the wellsprings of his discouragement, but he does mention one loss. “We are all today in deep mourning. One of our beloved teachers died yesterday at 4 bells. She was sick one week. We thought her in no danger till just before her death … Mrs. Carrie McGetchen of Maine.”

Death would soon become a daily occurrence. The great yellow fever epidemic of 1864 is just around the corner.

Rev. Comings to “dear ones at home,” Mar. 19, 1864

Since the recent Confederate attacks, he is spending a great deal of time visiting wounded and sick soldiers at Hammond Hospital, the Union army’s hospital in Beaufort. The hospital occupies a building that was formerly the Atlantic Hotel, a seaside resort.  “Since the last excitement …  my duties have been altogether too much for me to endure a great while … ” He says that he is hoping to leave Beaufort in April. Sarah wants to stay until June or July.

Rev. Comings to his Sunday school students, April 3, 1864

In gratitude for a donation to his work, he writes the children in his old Sunday school class in East Berkshire, Vermont. In that letter, he tells them how one group of African Americans recently escaped from the Confederacy and reached Beaufort.

“About 10 days ago, some 300 or more of our soldiers went about 40 miles from this in a gunboat, taking with them two small flat-boats, with the design of letting free a large number of slaves, who are kept in bondage.

“A terrible storm came on very soon, and the whole party came very near being lost in the sea. One colored man, who went to manage a flat-boat, was lost. Noble fellow! He would not abandon his boat not even to save his own life, as long as there was the least hope that he might land and give his brethren a chance to escape from slavery. Thus he gave of his life.

“Some of this party succeeded in landing and brought away all the slaves there were on two plantations. In all there 41 men women and children.”

He then informs the children that he used their donation to purchase clothes and other provisions for those people.

Sarah Comings to (illegible), April 10, 1864

She praises the Rev. James Walker Hood for his sermon at a quarterly meeting of a local church — Purvis Chapel presumably.

Rev. Comings to Fanny, April 19, 1864

He is headed back to Vermont, but he is still in Beaufort and waiting for a ship north. He is still referring to African Americans as “darkies.”

 * * *

“SHE MUST AND WOULD LEARN TO READ”

Along with the letters of Elam and Sarah Comings, Oberlin also had a clipping from an anti-slavery newspaper that mentioned the Rev. Comings and an African American woman in Beaufort.

That newspaper, The Morning Star, was published by Free Will Baptists in Dover, New Hampshire. The clipping does not include a date, but the newspaper’s editor, William Burr, visited Beaufort in March 1864.

I am not sure, but Burr apparently traveled with another anti-slavery activist, Ebenezer Knowlton, who was also involved with The Morning Star.

While in Beaufort, they met with Rev. Comings and toured the local African American schools. In the pages of The Morning Star, Knowlton later recounted a story that an African American woman in Beaufort told him about her struggle to learn to read and write while she was still an enslaved laborer.

Her story is very brief, but I think it has a special poignancy. The struggle of enslaved African Americans to get access to books, and most particularly the Bible, and the efforts of slaveholders to keep them from doing so, is one of the central themes in the history of American slavery.

Here is the excerpt from The Morning Star:

“Bro. Comings has just introduced me to a young woman, who he says is one of the most truthful, intelligent and really devoted, he has met among the freed slaves. She told me a few years ago she felt that she must and would learn to read – that she got visitors to read the labels on their trunks to her — then got a primer, which she used to hide under her bonnet in her bandbox. 

“Her master in some way mistrusted that she had learned to read, and one day called her in great haste and said, `Go to the library and bring me the first volume of Hannah Moore.’

(Hannah Moore was an English poet, playwright and religious writer. She lived from 1745 to 1833).

“Being thrown off her guard by his unusual and excited manner, and fearing to disobey his order, she went and brought him the book. 

“`There,’ said he, `Malinda, I thought you had learned to read, now I know you have.’ Then said Malinda to me, ‘he stripped me and whipped me almost to death!’ 

“`O Mr. Knowlton,’ said she, `can I ever be thankful enough … , that my children can now learn to read the Bible without being whipped to death for it?’”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Over the last several years, I have written a series of photo essays focusing on Charles A. Farrell’s photographs of fishing communities on the North Carolina coast in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

This is the 10th and last essay that I am devoting to Farrell’s remarkable collection of photographs.

In this essay, I will showcase photographs that he took on Cedar Island, Wanchese, Manns Harbor and one or two other fishing villages that I have not previously featured in this series, as well as a few old favorites.

But I mainly want to do something else, and it is something that maybe I should have done when I began this series. At that time, I suppose that I was afraid that it would distract from the people and places in his photographs.

But now I think it is time to explain why Charles Farrell never published his extraordinary photographs and why he and his photographs were forgotten for so many years.

* * *

That story goes back to the 1930s when Farrell, and often his wife Anne, began traveling the backroads of the North Carolina coast.

At that time, they lived in Greensboro, where they ran an art supply business, camera store and photography studio called The Art Shop. But whenever they could spare the time, they headed east to the coast.

How Charles Farrell came to feel so akin to the state’s fishing communities has never been clear to me. His father was an itinerant tintype photographer who, after the Civil War, traveled from hamlet to hamlet, making portraits for people who had often never seen a camera before.

I have wondered if Charles’ father used to visit the fishing villages that his son later grew so entranced by, and if his father’s stories later led Charles to visit those communities and fall under their spell. But of course, I don’t really know.

What I do know though is that Charles kept returning to those fishing communities again and again, as if he was searching for some lost part of himself by the sea.

Beginning in 1936 or 1937, he began documenting life and work in dozens of the state’s fishing communities.

Those of you who live on or often visit the North Carolina coast will recognize the names of some of the places that he visited — Beaufort, Southport, Nags Head, Manteo, Edenton and others.

You may or may not recognize the names of some of the other places he visited: Terrapin Point, Colerain, Brown’s Island, Marines, Stumpy Point and others that barely exist anymore, though some of them were among the state’s most important centers of commercial fishing in the 1930s.

The most compelling thing about Farrell’s work to me has always been that he had a special eye for those who usually go unseen in historical photographs of North Carolina’s fishing communities: women, people of color, children and the aged.

In addition, Farrell carried his camera places that other photographers did not go: the insides of canneries and fish houses, the mess halls and engine rooms of fishing boats, salting sheds, net lofts, bunk houses and wherever else he found those who made their living from the sea.

Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, his photographs make up the fullest visual portrait of North Carolina’s fishing communities in the first half of the 20^th century in existence.

* * *

In the late 1930s, Farrell signed a contract with William Couch, the editor-in-chief at the University of North Carolina Press, to publish a book that would feature his photographs of North Carolina’s fishing communities.

Farrell never finished that book, however. The photographs were never published in a book or anywhere else. For decades, the prints and negatives remained in boxes, all but forgotten, presumably either at the Farrells’ home or shop in Greensboro.

As gifted as he was as a photographer, Farrell soon realized that he had not developed his talents as a writer and the book that he and Couch envisioned was to have been a combination of photographs and writing.

But something else was going on, too, which I realized while I was doing background research on Farrell’s life in preparation for writing the first photo essay in this series.

That photo essay was called “An Eye for Mullet: The Photographs of Charles A. Farrell.” In that first part of the series, I focused on just one group of photographs, which Farrell took at a mullet fishermen’s camp on Browns Island, in Onslow County, in 1938.

That photo-essay originally appeared in Southern Cultures, a scholarly journal published by the Center for the Study of the American South at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

What I discovered was that Farrell was struggling with what would eventually become an incapacitating mental illness while he was working on his book of coastal photographs.

I learned something of his illness from his family. I spoke with his younger sister, one of his sons and one of his nephews. All generously shared their recollections of Charles Farrell with me. I appreciated this especially because, at least for his son, it was painful to do so.

I also learned a good deal about Farrell’s mental illness from a collection of the family’s letters, diaries and other records that has been preserved at the Greensboro Historical Museum.

I still do not fully understand the nature of his ailment, however. All I know for sure is that he struggled to write the book in the early 1940s, when he first tried to put pen to paper. That is evident in a series of correspondence between Farrell and his editors that is preserved at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

But the fate of Farrell’s coastal photographs was really sealed a few years later, in 1948, when he was hospitalized in Greensboro.

While in the hospital, Charles Farrell underwent a neurosurgical treatment called a transorbital lobotomy.

They were better known as “icepick lobotomies.” The first one in the U.S., which was performed at George Washington University in 1936, was actually done with an icepick.

In performing the procedures, surgeons severed the connections to the brain’s prefrontal cortex by driving a surgical tool through the patient’s eye socket with a small mallet.

Most Americans know of lobotomies, if they know of them at all, one of two ways. Some recall that Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, had a prefrontal lobotomy in 1941. She was incapacitated the rest of her life, and the Kennedy family largely kept her out of the public eye.

Others remember the 1975 movie “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was based on Ken Kesey’s wonderful book of the same name.

At the movie’s end, Randall McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, is forced against his will to have a lobotomy to repress his rebellion against the asylum in which he was being held.

The peak year for the procedure’s use in the U.S. was 1949, just after Charles Farrell’s surgery. In that year, surgeons performed more than 5,000 transorbital lobotomies in the U.S.

Particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, psychiatrists looked to the procedure for treating a host of mental illnesses for which they had no effective treatments at the time. Those mental illnesses ranged from schizophrenia to alcoholism.

The neurosurgeon most responsible for the procedure’s popularity in the U.S., Dr. Walter Freeman, referred to the desired effect as “surgically induced childhood.” Most patients, including Farrell, became passive, emotionally blunted and limited in their intellectual range.

The efficacy of transorbital lobotomies was widely debated. So was their morality. As early as 1950, some countries had banned them, considering them both ineffective and inhumane.

Reports of abuses of the procedure were also widespread.

In a sign of the mental health profession’s own maladies at that time, a strikingly disproportionate percentage of the procedures in the U.S. and other Western nations was done on women, often with an eye toward making them more docile and compliant.

There is also some evidence that Dr. Freeman, at least, was more inclined to perform transorbital lobotomies on African American patients than on white patients.

I have also read accounts of surgeons using icepick lobotomies as a “treatment” for same-sex attraction. In a case I recently discovered near my home, a psychiatrist apparently also used the procedure in an unsuccessful attempt to “cure” a decorated World War II veteran of his affection for cross dressing.

What led Farrell’s family and physicians to resort to a transorbital lobotomy is not clear to me. His surviving family, who were too young at the time to know for sure, suspect alcohol was involved.

But if the nature of his struggles is still mysterious, I do know this: Charles Farrell’s life as a photographer and artist ended on the day of his surgery.

When I spoke with his family, they told me that he lived a quiet, rather passive and apparently untroubled existence for the rest of his life. Unlike Rosemary Kennedy, he was never institutionalized, however. He could still speak intelligibly, and he still got around on his own a little.

When I talked with his younger sister, she recalled that he even sometimes caught a city bus and went downtown to visit with old friends.

After her husband’s surgery, Anne Farrell ran The Art Shop until it went out of business in the early 1960s. She and Charles both lived until 1977. He died at the age of 84, and she was a year younger.

After their deaths, their son Roger Farrell, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Cornell, donated more than a thousand of Charles’ photographs to the State Archives of North Carolina. Roger and I talked about his father not long before he passed away in 2017 at the age of 88.

 * * *

When he took these photographs, we now know, Farrell was a broken man or, at the very least, a man on the edge of breaking.

I wish he could have known how much his photographs would come to mean to those of us seeking to understand North Carolina’s coastal past.

I also wish that he could have seen what happened when I carried his photographs back to the fishing communities where he took them and visited with the descendants of the people in those photographs.

Or what happened when I carried them to local fishing docks, spread them out at fish houses, took them to family reunions and church homecomings and shared them on social media.

In several places, local people kindly hosted gatherings at community centers, local museums, and churches so that we could get together and look at the photographs and talk about them. At those events, we usually shared a supper and then I projected Farrell’s photographs on a screen.

How I wish he could have heard the memories that his photographs awakened, and the stories that spilled forth. How I wish he could have known the joy of it all, as we came face to face with his one true work of art, these portraits of a time and place bound deeply to the sea.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I found this group of photographs at the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh. They were taken in Salter Path, a fishing village on the North Carolina coast, probably in 1938 or 1939.

Salter Path is located on Bogue Banks, a 21-mile-long barrier island best known for being the site of Fort Macon State Park, the North Carolina Aquarium and some of the state’s most popular beach resort communities, including Atlantic Beach, Pine Knoll Shores and Emerald Isle.

I want to look at the history of Salter Path before the first hotels and condominiums were built there. When Charles A. Farrell took these photographs, Salter Path was the only settlement of any kind on the western two-thirds of the island.

At that time, no paved road yet led to Salter Path. People came and went largely in boats. Lights were few and far between. On a clear night, you felt as if you could see every star in the heavens.

Farrell’s photographs give us a glimpse of Salter Path just before the hotels and beach resorts showed up, the first paved road was built and all the rest.

I have paired Farrell’s photographs today with brief excerpts from a book called “Judgment Land: The Story of Salter Path,” which was written by an island visitor and sometimes resident named Kay Holt Roberts Stephens back in 1984.

Long out of print, Kay Stephens’ book lets us hear the voices of some of village’s oldest residents at that time. Several of those island people recalled when Salter Path was first settled in the 1890s.

The oldest of those islanders even remembered other settlements that were located on the western half of Bogue Banks in the late 1800s — Yellow Hill, Rice Path, Bell’s Cove and others. Those communities faded away in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some of their people moved to Broad Creek and other communities on the mainland, but others helped to build the new village of Salter Path.

With the help of those people’s memories and Farrell’s photographs, we can learn at least a bit about what Salter Path and the whole western part of Bogue Banks was like in those long-ago days.

* * *

Approximately a mile west of where Salter Path is now, in a section of the island that was nestled down among live oak glades and sand dunes, there used to be a little village called Rice Path.

In “Judgment Land,” Kay Stephens described how Rice Path got its name:

“Sometime between 1865 and 1880, a ship loaded with rice wrecked on the beach. The families living on the banks … went aboard ship, filled their bags with rice and carried it across the sand dunes through the low growing shrubs, through the closely knit live oak trees and then on to the shores of Bogue Sound. There they loaded the rice on their skiffs and took it home. From then on the path and the settlement that grew up in the vicinity was referred to as Rice Path.”

According to the old islanders who visited with Kay Stephens, the move of the people in Rice Path and the other little settlements on the western part of Bogue Banks to Salter Path was prompted partly by a changing economy and partly by a changing landscape.

“By 1896, some of the settlers on the western end of Bogue Banks were becoming dissatisfied with their homesites. Each year it became more difficult to raise a garden due to the encroaching sand and … salt spray. The families living … between Hopey Ann Hill and Yellow Hill were especially affected as portions of the banks were eroding rapidly. Also, the settlers felt a need to be closer to Beaufort and Morehead City, the towns they turned to for trade. Therefore in March of 1896 the first permanent settlers moved to the area, which would be called the village of Salter Path.”

One of Kay Stephens’ best sources is an unpublished memoir written by an island woman named Alice Guthrie Smith. Ms. Smith was born at the Rice Path in 1892, and she apparently wrote her recollections of her early life on the island sometime in the 1950s.

I have never seen her recollections, but fortunately Stephens quotes from them liberally.

Like quite a few other families, Alice Guthrie Smith’s family came to Bogue Banks from Shackleford Banks, the barrier island just to the east. Her grandparents, John Wallace and Hopey Ann Guthrie, left Shackleford Banks after he had a severe fall at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and was left crippled.

Hopey Ann Guthrie apparently thought that life might be a little easier on Bogue Banks than at Shackleford. I am not sure why, though I suspect that she wanted a new home closer to the mainland and a bit more protected from the hurricanes that had been so hard on the villages at Shackleford.

John Wallace died two or three years after the family’s arrival at the Rice Path. Hopey Ann raised their large family on her own, living largely off the sea. The site of their home came to be known as Hopey Ann Hill.

In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith remembered when her family left the Rice Path and moved to Salter Path.

Kay Stephens quotes her in “Judgment Land”:

“Well, we lived to that house … until March 1896. (Our neighbors) Rumley Willis, Henry Willis, Alonza Guthrie and Damon Guthrie all decided they would move to the Salter Path. So, here we go. Well the day came for everybody to go down to the Salter Path and clear up their place, burn the pine straw and leaves and get their place ready to take their house down. So, Rumley put his house on a hill near the sound on the east side of the Salter Path that runs from the ocean to the sound. There were large oak trees all around his house. It was a beautiful place to build… There were only four families at first, but it wasn’t long before most of the people that lived to Rice Path, Yellow Hill, Bill’s Point and Belco moved to Salter Path and Broad Creek.”

The early settlers at Salter Path did not hold deeds to the property that they occupied, but saw the land being unused and made their homes there, a very old practice on the banks.

For that reason, the squatters, as they became known, later ran into legal entanglements, including a formal complaint from the land’s actual owner, a New Yorker named Alice Hoffman, who was Eleanor Roosevelt’s aunt. The legal issues were resolved in the 1920s and the Salter Pathers were allowed to stay on the land, though with restrictions that limited the village’s growth.

Community life at Salter Path revolved around a solitary church, a tiny graded school and, for the men at least, the general store. In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith recalled that first church in Salter Path:

“That was the place where all the churches in Carteret County would meet and have their summer picnics. Oh, wasn’t that a happy time for everybody present! Everybody was in love and harmony with each other, and we looked forward to that day. Everybody took their baskets full of good things to eat and after everybody got through eating and drinking lemonade…, we would have preaching and singing or somebody would make a speech. Now, that was the good old days!”

My mother was born and raised in Harlowe, a little community 12 miles from Salter Path on the mainland of Carteret County. I still remember her telling me about a Sunday school picnic on Bogue Banks. It may have been the only time that she visited the island as a child, which was around the time of these photographs.

She said it was quite an adventure. They made the journey by boat and at that age, she had rarely if ever traveled so far from home.

One of the state’s oldest and largest fisheries, the salt mullet fishery was a big part of life on Bogue Banks in the 1930s.

This is one of my favorite images from “Judgment Land”:

“In the summer when the mullet would run in big black schools out in the ocean, some of the settlers would come to the beach near Riley (Salter)’s home. They would encircle the mullet with the long nets which had … been knit by their women. Hundreds of pounds of mullet would be brought to shore. All day long the women would sit with their `sitting up babies’ between their legs and split and gut the fish. Their long cotton dresses and even their sunbonnets were slick where they had wiped their hands ….”

Mullet fishing is still important in Salter Path today, though perhaps it means more now to the fishermen’s hearts than it does to their pantries or pocketbooks. The beach seine fishery for mullet has come and gone elsewhere on the North Carolina coast, but a solitary crew of the village’s men still persist in fishing in much the same way as their ancestors did for many generations before them.

In “Judgment Land,” Kay Stephens also quotes Alice Guthrie Smith’s memoir about the way that the islanders traded their salt mullet for other things that they needed in life.

“They would wash and clean them so they could salt them down, head them up, and leave those barrels of fish on the beach until sometime later. In the fall, October or November, a large boat from Down East (the eastern part of Carteret County) would come up to Salter Path loaded with sweet potatoes and corn. They would trade the corn and potatoes for the fish that the people had salted. 

“The way they got the fish from the beach to the sound was to tie a rope around the barrel and two men would get a long pole and put it through the rope, take the poles on their shoulders, and carry the barrels down the Salter Path to the sound. There they put them in skiffs, took them out to the deep water where the large boat was and put them aboard the boat after they took the corn and potatoes out.”

According to legend, the coming and going of those mullet fishermen wore a sandy path from the ocean beach across the dunes and swales to the shores of Bogue Sound. The path ran by the home of Riley Salter and his family, which led people to call it Salter Path and gave the village its name.

When Kay Stephens was researching “Judgment Land,” she spent a great deal of time with Lillian Golden, a local woman who was born on the island in 1901.

I love Lillian Golden’s descriptions of island life because they are so granular: in Ms. Golden’s words, you can really hear and understand the practicalities of how the Bogue Bankers fashioned a life there on the edge of the sea.

In this excerpt from “Judgment Land,” Stephens recounts how Lillian Golden described how the islanders made their mattresses.

“The villagers made their ticking out of flat homespun. The mattress that was placed on top of the slats was stuffed with seaweed. A feather mattress was placed on top of the seaweed mattress. The seaweed used in the mattresses was gathered along the shore and spread on bushes. It was left there through several rains so the salt water and other material could wash out. The sun would then bleach the seaweeds.”

Well into the 20th century, the villagers made feather mattresses. Stephens talked with another local woman, for instance, whose mother had a mattress stuffed with robin feathers.

In the 1800s and into the 1900s, the islanders often caught robins and other songbirds in fishing nets spread among the wax myrtle and yaupon bushes around their homes. They valued the birds for their feathers, but also sought them out in order to feed their families.

Now and then, the sea provided very different kinds of gifts. In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith recalled, for instance, how wind and waves knocked a load of lumber off a schooner during the great hurricane of 1885.

The lumber washed up on Bogue Banks and after the storm, she wrote, “everybody that needed lumber went over to the beach and pulled up all they wanted. Dad saved enough to start him a small house to the Rice Path.”

I am always surprised, when I visit the old homes on Salter Path or on Ocracoke or some other island village, how often people tell me that this room’s floor or this chest of drawers or this table came off a shipwreck years ago.

It always feels as if there is no limit to the way that the islanders were bound to and shaped by the ways of the sea.

Now and then, I get a glimpse in “Judgment Land” at something that I rarely hear talked about: the fear that the island’s women felt for their safety and the safety of their daughters when their husbands were away fishing and hunting or when their husbands had died and left them on their own.

Kay Stephens tells the story, for instance, of a night during the Civil War when three men from the mainland forced their way into the home of Francis and Horatio Frost and raped two of their daughters. At the time, Horatio and their only son were gigging flounder on Bogue Sound.

In another part of the book, Lillian Golden recalled the fear that she and her widowed mother felt at their home in Salter Path when she was a girl.

“The neighborhood wasn’t thickly settled, and you didn’t think of calling nobody … I was scared to go to sleep nights. We were in the woods. The other young’uns had a father with them, you see.

Like so many other young women of the time, Lillian did not wear make-up and rarely wore jewelry in the hope that she could avoid men’s attentions.

I found Lillian Golden’s recollections of her widowed mother especially entrancing when I reread “Judgment Land” the other day.

Her mother, Mary Francis Smith, took her husband’s death very hard. He was scarcely 30 years old when he died after a long illness in 1901. Beset by grief, Laura Francis was visited by nightmares for years.

Lillian told Kay Stephens that, in order to comfort her mother, she slept with her, nuzzled against her back, from the time that she was a little girl until she was married in 1918.

Yet for all that, Mary Francis managed to provide for herself and her children.

”She clammed and caught soft-shell crabs in the spring and summer. She took in sewing, sometimes staying up late into the night to finish a dress that was wanted the next day. In the fall and winter she and her children would cut wood and sell it by the cord …

“She would cut the leaves off the yaupon (bushes) and sell them to a factory on Harkers Island. (Harkers Island is 18 miles east of Salter Path.) There the leaves were cured and put into sacks and sold under the brand name `Carolina Tea.’

“In 1905 after her aunt Mahalia Ann Guthrie was no longer able to serve as the village midwife, Laura Francis began her long career delivering the babies not only in Salter Path but elsewhere on the banks.”

She was a little bit of everything: fisherwoman, seamstress, woodcutter, herbalist, midwife and mother, as well as, for a time, the village’s postmistress.

To get by, Mary Francis saved and reused every little thing, kept two big gardens and spun her own thread and made her family’s clothes. Her neighbors shared and together they made do and got by.

My friend Karen Willis Amspacher is the director and guiding spirit at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. Many of her ancestors came from Shackleford Banks, the island I mentioned earlier that is just to the east of Bogue Banks.

More than once, when we have been discussing how hard it was to survive on those islands back in the day, Karen has just shaken her head and told me, “Those were some tough folks, David. That’s all I can say. Those were some tough folks.”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

In a lovely book called “Finest Kind: A Celebration of a Florida Fishing Village,” Ben Green remembers how his ancestors and other families left Carteret County, North Carolina, in the 1880s and established a new fishing village 600 miles south on the southwest coast of Florida.

First published in 1985, Green’s book describes the founding of Cortez, now known as the last fishing village on the Florida Suncoast. The village is 35 miles below Tampa, on the north end of Sarasota Bay.

“This book is an attempt to capture the richness and joy of the people of Cortez and also, with unashamed subjectivity, to raise the deep moral and political questions of whether this nation as a whole, and the state of Florida, in particular, can afford to lose these few small communities that remain. In short, can a nation afford to destroy its traditions and roots, and at what price?”

                                             David Green, “Finest Kind”

When he was researching “Finest Kind,” Green talked with Cortez’s oldest resident, Lela Garner Taylor. She wasn’t one of the village’s very first residents, but she arrived there only a couple decades after the first group of migrants made the trip from Carteret County.

“I was born in Carteret County, North Carolina, on the 28^th of January, in 1888,” she told him. “We lived right on Bogue Sound.”

In 1907, Miss Lela married a sharpie captain named Neriah Taylor. At the time, he was making his living by towing logs to the local lumber mills.

By then, Carteret County watermen had been leaving home and heading for southwest Florida for years. Neriah had apparently gone mullet fishing down there at least once, then returned home.

He must have liked the wildness of the place and the feeling of being on a new frontier. At the turn of the century, settlements were still few and far between all the way from Sarasota Bay to the Everglades.

In those days, the Everglades still reached all the way to Lake Okeechobee. All along that part of the Gulf of Mexico, land speculators, railroad interests, phosphate barons and sprawling seaside resorts would later hold dominion, but they had barely gotten a foothold yet.

In 1900, Naples still only had about 80 residents. Fort Myers had only a few hundred. Even Tampa was still just a little town.

What southwest Florida did have though was endless miles of mangrove swamp, remote keys and wild barrier islands — and fish. Lots of fish.

Foremost among those fish were striped mullet, or as people in Carteret County call them, “jumpin’ mullet.” For much of the 19^th century, Carteret County’s salt mullet trade had been one of the largest saltwater commercial fisheries anywhere in the southern states.

Jumpin’ mullet was the fish that bound Carteret County and southwest Florida together.

On the southwest coast of Florida, fishermen had also been catching mullet and salting the fish and roe for generations.

In fact, according to Yale historian Michelle Zacks’ wonderful study of mullet fishing in Southwest Florida, Spanish fishermen from Cuba had been visiting those waters and harvesting mullet for shipment to Cuba since at least the late 1600s.

On the mullet fishing grounds, Dr. Zacks recounts, the Spanish fishermen worked early on with Calusa Indian fishermen, and later with Creek and Yamasee Indian fishermen, as well as with fugitive enslaved people.

Dr. Zacks goes on to note that by the late 1800s mullet was by far Florida’s largest fishery and salt mullet and mullet roe were mainstays on people’s dinner tables, particularly in the rural parts of the state.

She quotes one observer in Florida back in those days saying that salt mullet was sometimes “on the table…three times a day.”

The salt mullet trade to Cuba began to fade at the end of the 19^th century, however. In the 1880s and 1890s, the first railroads reached Tampa. The railroads then began to inch further into southwest Florida, opening up the fresh fish trade to other parts of the United States for the first time.

Like so many in Carteret County, Miss Lela’s husband wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity.

“So in July of 1911 we come on the sharpie to Morehead (City), me and him and our first two children, and then we got on the train to New Bern and stayed the night,” Miss Lela told Ben Green.

They took the train to Tampa, boarded a steamer down the coast to Bradenton and then took a taxi to Cortez.

“Once we got settled I liked it,” Miss Lela remembered. “But that first year I was still so homesick for North Carolina that I cried all Christmas Day.”

* * *

Ben Green’s great-grandfather, Billy Fulford, and two of his brothers had arrived in Cortez even earlier. In doing the research for “Finest Kind,” Ben discovered that they left a Carteret County community called the Straits sometime in the early 1880s.

At the time, Capt. Fulford, as he came to be known, was just a young thing, barely 18 years old.

The Fulford brothers first tried fishing at Cedar Key, and then made another go of it at Perico Island. They finally settled down at a place called Hunter’s Point, which had a nice little harbor looking out on Sarasota Bay.

Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key offered the harbor some protection from storms, and the local fishing boats could reach the mullet fishing grounds in the Gulf of Mexico via Longboat Pass.

Others from Carteret County soon joined them. They included people with surnames that anyone from the North Carolina coast would recognize in a heartbeat: Guthries, Willises, Fulfords, Chadwicks, Taylors, Lewises and others.

Some came from the tidewater farm country along Bogue Sound. Some came from the fishing villages east of North River. Some came from the “Ca’e Banks” and others from the neighborhood known as the Promise Land.

Some were farmers weary of trying to make a living on the land.

Ben Green interviewed one of those farmers, a latecomer to Cortez (as the village came to be called) named Earl Guthrie.

“I was raised on our farm and that’s where I done my work was on that farm,” Mr. Guthrie told Ben. “I decided I didn’t want no part of farming and that’s why I come to Florida.” He arrived in Cortez in 1921.

At the time he could get a train ticket from North Carolina to Tampa for $20.13. “Every one of them Guthrie boys up there (in Carteret County), as soon as they was growed, they’d head for Florida,” he recalled.

If they could not afford a ticket, they jumped on a boxcar and rode down that way. “That’s how a lot of them come, by boxcar,” Mr. Guthrie said.

Some only stayed in Cortez during the mullet fishing season in the fall and winter. Then they returned to Carteret County and helped their families on the farm the rest of the year.

In “Finest Kind,” an older gentleman named Grey Fulford recalled his childhood in Cortez. His father had died in the big flu epidemic of 1918, so his mother Mamie made her living by running a boardinghouse.

He remembered that most of Mamie Fulford’s boarders were those young Carteret County fishermen. In most cases, they had come to Cortez for the fall roe mullet season and then went back home.

“She’d charge them about $5.00 a week and another 50 cents to do their laundry,” Mr. Fulford told Ben Green.

“Sometimes she’d have 6 or 7 of them at a time sleeping on cots in the old house we rented out. It was like a hotel. Momma had two old wood stoves and she hired two other women to help with the cooking, and Grandma would help with the biscuits and the cornbread.”

Other Carteret County fishermen settled down in Cortez. They started fish houses and boatyards and little stores. Before long, the village had a school, a church and a post office.

There were, of course, setbacks in Cortez, and none was worse than the great hurricane of 1921. That storm scoured the village’s waterfront, washing away all the fish houses and most of everything else, too.

The Great Depression was hard there too and made harder when the mullet mysteriously vanished for most of a decade.

Yet the village didn’t give up. While real estate developments and resorts grew up in the distance, Cortez remained tied to the sea and to Carteret County.

Well into the 1930s, Cortez’s children would sometimes return to Carteret County to work on local fishing boats for part of the year, often alongside a grandfather or a great-uncle.

At the same time, new young men and women from Carteret County kept showing up in Cortez, most of them looking for adventure and a fresh start in a place that felt a lot like home.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who studies the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A little more than a century ago, a group of seagoing people from the “Down East” part of Carteret County, settled on the shores of Lake Erie and began commercial fishing.

They came from a part of Down East known as the Straits, five miles east of Beaufort. At that time, it was a quiet, remote land, hundreds of miles from the crowds and clutter of Industrial America. The local people largely got around by boat. Salt marshes and broad estuaries stretched to the horizon.

But of course the sea has no boundaries and the world’s oceans and rivers make neighbors of us all.

So it was with the people from the Straits. They followed the sea a thousand miles from home and built a community that was a tiny piece of Down East on the shores of Lake Erie.

A trip to Vermilion

The story of those Down Easterners on Lake Erie has never really been told. I only learned about them recently myself. As best I can tell, all but a few old timers have forgotten them.

But recently my wife and I happened to be vacationing at two dear friends’ cottage in Vermilion, Ohio, right on Lake Erie, which is one of the places that those Down Easterners made a new home.

As soon as I got to Vermilion, I recalled that one of the grandchildren of those wandering Down Easterners got in contact with me a year or two ago and told me their story.

That man’s name is Giles Willis Jr. Now 88 years old, Mr. Willis spent much of his early life on Lake Erie. He shared photographs of those days with me, and he told me stories about his life there when he was a boy. He recalled as well what his father and other older relatives had told him about their fishing days on Lake Erie before he was born in 1932.

He also sent me a video copy of a wonderful interview with his father’s sister Evelyn describing the little community on Lake Erie.

Love on Lake Erie

According to Mr. Willis, the first fishermen from Carteret County to settle on Lake Erie were his great-uncle Giles Whitehurst and another man named Tom Pigott.

Whitehurst and Pigott were both from the Straits and had always been around boats and water people. In the late 1800s, Giles Whitehurst’s father, Capt. John A. Whitehurst, had been the master of a three-masted schooner that traded all along the East Coast and in the West Indies.

His last vessel, a two-masted schooner named the J. H. Potter, was built at North River, not far from the Straits, in 1875.

Capt. John A. Whitehurst eventually bought farmland in the part of Straits that came to be called Gloucester in the early 1900s. The village was named after the Massachusetts seaport that another local schooner captain used to visit on his voyages north.

Capt. Whitehurst’s son Giles Whitehurst and the captain’s old first mate, Tom Pigott, apparently set out on their own to make a living on the water in the last years of the 1800s or in the first few years of the 1900s.

For a time — I’ve heard secondhand — they may have fished down in Punta Gorda, Florida, where another, larger group of Down East fishermen had gone in search of new fishing grounds in the late 1800s.

Pigott and Whitehurst later ended up far to the north though. They may have worked on a number of vessels, but Giles Willis, Jr. recalled one in particular, a steam yacht called the Peerless. Tom Pigott was apparently the yacht’s captain and Giles Whitehurst was his first mate or engineer.

Eventually their voyages led them to Lake Erie. There, on the south shore of the lake, in the town of Grand River, Ohio, Giles Whitehurst and Tom Pigott met a pair of sisters and fell in love.

Giles Whitehurst married Adah Searle in 1906. Tom Pigott married her sister Mabel around the same time.

A fishery at Grand River

According to family lore, Giles Whitehurst was the first of three Whitehurst brothers to fish on Lake Erie. Another brother, Richard, soon joined Giles in Grand River. In or about 1915, the brothers opened a fishing business there.

Richard Whitehurst met his wife in Grand River, too. Her name was Olive Swan and she was from Iowa.

Yet another brother, Monroe, joined them after he finished a stint in the U.S. Life-Saving Service during World War I.

Giles Willis Jr.’s father, Giles Willis, was one of a number of other Down Easterners who joined them in the mid-1920s. He was the son of the Whitehurst brothers’ sister, Olivia, and Wilbur Willis, who was from Williston, a village 6 or 7 miles north of the Straits.

Then, sometime around 1930, the Whitehurst clan left Grand River and relocated to Vermilion, 70 miles to the west, on the other side of Cleveland. The town is situated at the mouth of the Vermilion River, where it flows into Lake Erie, in what people up there used to call “The Firelands” or the “Sufferers’ Lands.”

At that time, Vermilion probably reminded the Whitehursts at least a little bit of home. Fish houses lined the waterfront. Fishing boats crowded the little harbor. All along the shore, nets were spread out to dry. Almost every family made their living by fishing.

Of course, not everything was the same: winters were snowy and icy and the little town was beset by storms that sometimes came off the lake with bone-chilling fury.

At the Vermlion History Museum and the Ritter Public Library in Vermilion, I found historical photographs of fishing boats with so much ice on them that I can’t imagine how they stayed afloat.

Many a winter, at least early on, the Whitehursts left Lake Erie and came back south to fish in warmer waters until the spring.

A Vermilion fishing life

When they settled in Vermilion, the Whitehursts operated three boats, all of which Giles Whitehurst built himself.

He ran one of the boats. He and his brothers had recruited two other fishermen from Carteret County to captain the other two.

While Giles Whitehurst oversaw the family’s fishing operation, his brother Richard ran their wholesale fish business and their brother Monroe, known as “Mund,” ran their family’s retail fish market, which was located on the second floor of the family’s fish house.

On the day I talked with him, Giles Willis Jr. remembered how, when he was a small boy, his great-uncle Richard would take him down to Lake Erie around 3 in the afternoon and they would look for the boats coming back from the fishing grounds.

The fishermen tended trap nets, which they staked out on the lake bottom as soon as the ice broke up in the spring.  (You can see a yellowed, stained example of a Vermilion fish company’s trap net plan from that era in the illustration below.)

In that weather, they required sturdy, covered boats that the Lake Erie fishermen called “fishing tugs.”

When I talked with Giles Willis Jr., he recalled how the fishermen dumped their catches out on the dock when they got back from the fishing grounds. The Whitehursts and the other workers, most were from Carteret County, would then sort them.

In those days, he said, they caught a lot of blue pike, white perch and pickerel (walleye) — the last being, he said, “a big fish.” He remembered that his dad often catered fish fries in Vermilion and the white perch were especially in demand at those events.

He recalled that roughly 10 people were working in the fish house when the boats unloaded at the dock. Each of the three boats had two or three crewmen. “The ones from Carteret County were staying upstairs,” on the second floor of the fish house, he told me.

After Giles Whitehurst died of pneumonia in 1933, his brother Monroe took over the boats and Giles Willis Jr.’s father started a fish market that was located separate from family’s fish house.

They also did a good deal of wholesale business. When the boats came in, they put the fish into boxes with ice in them, nailed them shut and put them on a truck. They carried them to the local train station and put them on a train for shipment to Cleveland and other distant parts.

Giles Willis Jr. told me that he loved going out on the fish house dock and watching the trains cross the Vermilion River on the New York Central Railroad Line. The freight trains were fun to see, too, but he especially liked to watch the 20^th Century Limited, the famous all-silver express train that ran from New York to Chicago.

“That would be a time — a little kid is going to look at this train and wonder who’s on that train and where they were going and (dream) maybe one day I would get to ride that train … ”

Coming Home

The little enclave of Down Easterners stayed on Lake Erie a total of roughly 40 years. The Whitehursts sold their fish business and moved back home to Carteret County in 1948.

I am not sure exactly why the Whitehursts and the other Carteret County fishermen left Lake Erie.

But when I visited the Ritter Public Library and the Vermilion History Museum, I learned that 1948 was around the time when commercial fishing catches on Lake Erie plummeted and Vermilion’s fishing boom ended. Today you won’t find a fish house in the town and there is very little commercial fishing on that part of Lake Erie.

Giles Willis Jr. estimated that somewhere between 30 and 40 Down Easterners made their home on Lake Erie over the years. Some stayed all year, while others traveled back and forth seasonally between the big lake and fishing grounds back south.

Those were not easy years for Carteret County’s fishermen. Especially during the Great Depression, many left home and followed the sea wherever it led. Some went looking for new fishing grounds. Some went in search of dredging, piloting and other maritime work anywhere they could find it.

In those days, if you lived on the North Carolina coast, it sometimes felt as if the local fishermen had scattered to the four winds. In New York City, for instance, every harbor pilot seemed to come from Smyrna, a village a few miles from Straits. On Ocracoke Island, on the other hand, every family seemed to have a father and/or a few sons that had left home and gone to work on dredge boats in Philadelphia and the Delaware River.

You can find my story on the historical connections between Ocracoke Island and Philadelphia here.

Florida was another place where Down East fishermen often strayed. Along the shores of the Straits and its neighbors — Harkers Island, Otway, Marshallberg — every family seemed to have somebody in Florida for at least part of the year, shrimping in Punta Gorda, for instance, or mullet fishing in Cortez, or menhaden fishing in Fernandina Beach.

Back in those days, travelers often described the Down East part of Carteret County as a remote land, where the “simple fishing people” remained untouched by the outside world. They seemed to think that everybody was descended from old English settlers, and they declared that the local people had little knowledge of the bigger world and its ways.

But none of those things was true at all, and such descriptions of any part of the North Carolina coast were and still are merely fanciful. As Giles Willis Jr., who is nearing his 90^th year, told me, “There’s always been a lot of back and forth between Carteret County and Ohio.”

Mr. Willis no doubt knows too, as I have learned, that Ohio is only one of many, many such places where those quiet little villages Down East are tied to distant lands by the sea.

 *  * *

Many, many thanks to Dennis Chadwick, Roger Whitehurst and most especially Giles Willis Jr. for all their help with this story. Thanks, too, to the staff and volunteers at the Vermilion History Museum, the Ritter Public Library in Vermilion and the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island. Finally, a big shout out and deep gratitude to Paul Baldasare and Jane Wettach for sharing their cottage in Vermilion with my wife Laura and me. One could not ask for a nicer place to stay or better company.  

According to his family’ papers at the Greensboro History Museum, the photographer Charles Farrell visited the Varnamtown fishermen at Bald Head Island in the fall of 1938.

At the time, he was staying in Southport, where he was photographing commercial fishermen and women mainly in the town’s two largest fisheries, the menhaden industry and the shrimp industry.

However, one day he also accepted an invitation to join a boating excursion across the Cape Fear River to Bald Head Island.

Today Bald Head Island is home to a sprawling beach resort, as well as a lovely wildlife preserve. At that time, though, the island was uninhabited, except for the likes of wild hogs and goats.

The wild hogs and goats roamed the island’s palmetto groves and live oak forests, looking askance no doubt at the fishermen, hunters and beachgoers that occasionally showed up.

Farrell did not expect to find commercial fishermen on the island that day. However, when he and his group arrived on the island, he discovered a crew of mullet fishermen at work. They were fishing on the ocean beach, not the river side of the island, quite likely on the same stretch of seashore and in much the same way as their families had been doing for generations.

(Mullet crews tended to be territorial, to say the least, and one did not tread on another crew’s beach lightly. Once a clan of fishermen claimed a beach, they often kept it for generations.)

Better known locally as “jumping mullet” or “bug-eye mullet” (for obvious reasons when you get to know them), striped mullet made up one of the most important saltwater fisheries on the North Carolina coast all the way from the late 1700s to World War II.

That was due partly to the incredible abundance of striped mullet in the waters just offshore the state’s barrier islands, particularly between Cape Lookout and the South Carolina border.

The striped mullet fishery also flourished because the fish take so well to being preserved with salt. Salting was the only method for preserving fish that was used extensively on the North Carolina coast prior to the introduction of mechanical ice making and refrigeration.

Particularly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, North Carolina’s fish dealers shipped vast quantities of salt mullet across the Eastern Seaboard. Kegs of salt mullet were also a staple in local pantries and winter storehouses.

On Bald Head Island, Farrell learned that the mullet fishing crew there came from Varnamtown, a fishing village 12 miles to the west in the tidal waters of the Lockwood Folly River.

Most — and maybe all — of the mullet fishermen at Bald Head Island that day were members of the Varnam clan — if not Varnams, they were likely cousins by marriage or other distant relatives.

The Varnams were a tough lot, by reputation, and some of the best known fishermen, vessel captains and boatbuilders on that part of the coast.

Like so many of the old fishing families, the Varnams (sometimes spelled “Varnums”) came to the North Carolina coast from a maritime part of New England. In their case, Sagadahoc County, Maine. The first Varnam settled on the banks of the Lockwood Folly River not long before the Civil War.

The first Varnam to come south, Roland Varnam, is said to have met a Native American woman, Sarah Jane Pridgen, when he arrived. The couple married and settled down by the shore and raised a family.

Over the generations, the Varnams stuck to the water: fishing, carrying freight and going to sea. Even into the early 1900s, the Varnams were building wooden sailing vessels, some of them for fishing and others for hauling freight between the little villages of Brunswick County and Wilmington.

As late as 1900, Capt. W. H. Varnam built a 37-foot coasting schooner, the Lillie V. Three years later, Harry Varnam and Roland Varnam (perhaps the first local Varnam’s grandson), along with John Holden, built and launched a new sharpie, the H. and V. Royall.

I wish I knew who the specific fishermen in Farrell’s photographs were and something about more about them.

I have only a couple of guesses. One might have been Wesley B. Varnam, who had once been the keeper of “Old Baldy,” the Bald Head Island Lighthouse, and knew the island especially well.

Another was almost certainly Johnny Varnum. I only know about him because he was a central figure in both a notorious double murder and a storied rescue of drowning swimmers.

In May of 1932, Varnum apparently discovered that his wife was having an affair with another man. He shot and killed his wife, then killed the other man. He then tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself. He finally turned himself in to the local sheriff and was later given a 20-year sentence for manslaughter.

In August 1937, however, Johnny Varnum was part of a prison work detail somewhere below Southport, presumably on Oak Island. The job of the prisoners on the work detail was to catch and salt fish for the consumption of the state’s inmates.

While they were fishing there, a group of visitors from High Point were cast fishing in heavy surf nearby. A wave apparently knocked down a young boy, and a riptide quickly pulled him over his head. Seeing the boy in trouble, his mother and father and another woman went in after him, but all were soon panicking and in danger of drowning.

On hearing their cries, Johnny Varnum came to the rescue. Rushing to the scene, he organized a chain of inmates from the shore into the breakers, with himself at the end of the chain reaching the four people in trouble and carrying them to safety.

A year later, in September 1938, Johnny Varnum was given a full pardon and released from prison after only serving six years of his sentence. According to W. B. Keziah, the Southport Leader’s editor, he immediate joined his kindred from Varnamtown at the mullet fishery on Bald Head Island.

I don’t know which of the men in these photographs is Johnny Varnum, but he should have been there when Farrell visited the island.

This was still the Great Depression and we can tell that the gang of fishermen from Varnamtown was a threadbare lot. Note the shoeless, worn feet, the old, sun-bleached trousers and shirts and the one older fisherman sitting next to the handsome young man in the straw hat that used little wooden pegs to hold together his shirt, almost like toothpicks, instead of buying buttons.

In the 1930s, nobody was making much money commercial fishing on the North Carolina coast, but the Varnamtown fishermen kept busy all year and seemed to be on the water all the time.

They fished for mullet on Bald Head Island in the fall. They joined Southport’s shrimping fleet when the shrimp were running, and they harvested oysters in the Lockwood Folly River in cold weather. When there wasn’t anything else to do, they retreated to their boatyards and fish houses, their duck blinds and hunting camps and the warmth of home and hearth.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

In recent years, I have been taking Charles Farrell’s photographs of the North Carolina coast back to the fishing villages where he took them in the 1930s.

One of the places that I have enjoyed going most is Sneads Ferry, which is located on the New River in Onslow County, a short ways from the river’s inlet into the Atlantic.

In Sneads Ferry, I have been blessed that many of the village’s oldest residents and most knowledgeable local historians have been willing to sit down with me and look at Farrell’s photographs. They identified people and places, shared stories and memories and recalled a bygone way of life on the edge of the sea.

I could not be more grateful to them and I feel privileged to share at least a little of what I Iearned from them with you.

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

-End-

Note from the author

A thousand thanks to Ron Brown, Dennis Chadwick, Dolly Fulcher, Jim Fulcher, Joe Fulcher, Michael Fulcher, Melba Marines McKeever, Freddie Midgette, Ginny Midgett Richardson, Betsy Taylor Sergomassov, Sheri Thurston, Rosetta Ward and David Yopp for sharing so much of their time, knowledge and wisdom with me. I cannot tell you how much it means to me.

Special thanks also to all the people who came out to the community meeting in Sneads Ferry. I learned so much from you all. For a historian like me, there’s just nothing more fun!

I’d also like to extend a very special thanks to Kim Andersen, the long-time head of photographic collections (now retired) at the State Archives of North Carolina, for so patiently assisting me in finding and copying Farrell’s photographs. Thanks to Kim and her colleagues, the entire Charles A. Farrell Photographic Collection is now available on the State Archives’ flickr site.

I would also like to thank to my old high school friend Peggy Garner, without whom I don’t think the community meeting in Sneads Ferry would have been possible. And for many different kinds of help, I want to thank Amelia Dees-Killette at the Swansboro Area Heritage Center Museum and Lisa Whitman-Grice and Patricia Hughey at the Onslow County Museum in Richlands.

To learn more about Sneads Ferry’s history, by the way, I highly recommend Ginny Richardson’s lovely, lyrical memoir, “Memory as a River: Recollections of the People and Places in the Small Fishing Village of Sneads Ferry, North Carolina.“

Taking Charles Farrell’s photographs back to Sneads Ferry, discovering these stories and getting to know you all has been such a joy — thank you, thank you, thank you.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe.

In the late 1930s, a photographer named Charles A. Farrell documented fishing communities across the North Carolina coast. In this post, I’d like to look at one group of those photographs, a collection of images of the menhaden industry in Beaufort and Southport.

By the time that Farrell took these photographs, the menhaden industry had been the state’s largest saltwater fishery for more than a generation. Locally known as “shad” or “pogie,” the silvery little fish were the basis of a huge commercial fishery that was the second industrial fishery in the U.S., after whaling, when it first developed in New England in the early 19th century.

Here in North Carolina, the centers of the menhaden industry were Beaufort, Morehead City and Southport. On their waterfronts, menhaden boats lined the wharves and factories processed tens of millions of tons of fish annually into massive quantities of fertilizer and oil.

When the wind was right, the aroma of the fish covered those towns like a blanket. Coastal visitors sometimes complained, but my cousins in the industry used to call it “the smell of money.”

The menhaden industry flourished on the North Carolina coast for more than a century. However, the state’s last menhaden factory, Beaufort Fisheries, closed its doors in 2005.

Over the last few years, when I am in these old fishing ports, I have occasionally carried Farrell’s photographs to old timers who used to work in the menhaden industry. We have looked at them together and talked about what they see in them, the people and the places and a way of life that is no more.

In this post, I would like to share a little of what I learned from a few of those old timers about the world of menhaden fishing in those long ago days before the Second World War.

* * *

When I was in Southport several years ago, I carried Farrell’s photographs to an old menhaden fisherman named Charles “Pete” Joyner. At the time, Mr. Joyner was 93 years old. He has since passed.

The photograph we started with was this portrait of a fisherman on the deck of a menhaden boat in 1939. Farrell took more than a thousand photographs on the North Carolina coast, but this is one of my favorites.

Sitting in his living room, Mr. Joyner smiled broadly when he saw the man’s face. He and the fisherman in Farrell’s photograph had been neighbors in Southport when he was a boy. They were cousins, too, and nearly 80 years ago they had been crew mates on a menhaden boat for a time.

The fisherman’s name was Elias “Nehi” Gore. In Farrell’s photograph, he is standing on the deck of one of the Brunswick Navigation Co.’s menhaden boats, the W.A. Anderson, John D. Eriksen, captain. He is resting one arm on one of the Anderson’s two purse boats.

Gore was a legend. In those days before power blocks and hydraulic lifts made menhaden fishing rely less on brute strength, most of the fishermen tended to be big, strong men. Elias Gore was the biggest, though, and he was reputedly one of the strongest.

He was at least 7 feet, 8 inches, in height, and as we can see in Farrell’s portrait of him, he was not slight of build.

He was born in Southport, a village at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, in 1906. He lived just down the street from from Mr. Joyner, who recalled that the big fisherman was the oldest or one of the oldest of 11 children.

Gore began working on menhaden boats when he was just a boy, he said. He had left school young and looked to menhaden fishing as a way to help his family get through hard times.

Another former Southport fisherman, Tookie Potter, whose father was a local menhaden boat captain, remembered that the menhaden company always paid Gore double wages because he was worth two good men on a boat. Those wages sent two of Gore’s younger siblings to college, not an easy thing to do in those days.

Pete Joyner and Elias Gore had worked together one fall, on a Southport menhaden boat that had gone up to Beaufort in pursuit of the big roe menhaden. That was not long after Mr. Joyner first went menhaden fishing in 1939. He was 17 years old at the time.

He told me that Gore was known for his gentleness and even temper, his devotion to his family and for his tenderheartedness.

“He was a good man to be around,” he said.

Mr. Joyner recalled that he had often seen Gore stop fights simply by picking up two men by the scruff of their necks, one in each hand, and holding them in the air until they calmed down.

Gore passed away in 1944, at the age of 38. An early death seems to have been the fate of many men of his size in those days, no matter the size of their hearts.

Farrell’s photograph is the best-known portrait of Elias Gore. Back in 2013, the North Carolina Maritime Museum Southport even used a life-size version of the photograph in an exhibit dedicated to his memory.

I think I like Farrell’s portrait so much because he captured Gore’s strength and size, but also the quiet dignity and gentleness within him.

* * *

On a trip to another part of the North Carolina coast, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to share Charles Farrell’s photographs of the menhaden industry with Capt. David Willis, one of the longest-serving menhaden boat captains in the United States.

I visited Capt. Willis in his hometown, Beaufort just down the road from where I grew up. At that time, he had just marked the 50^thanniversary of being a menhaden boat captain.

Capt. Willis had first taken command of a menhaden boat when he was only 24 years old. When I visited with him, he was 74 years old and still the captain of a menhaden boat.

He grew up in Lennoxville, a neighborhood in Beaufort that many of the old menhaden boat captains used to call home.

He dropped out of school in the 10^th grade to go fishing. It was a family tradition. His father had been captain of a menhaden boat. His grandfather had been captain of a menhaden boat.

His great-grandfather was menhaden fishermen, too. But back in those days, most menhaden fishing was done from the shore with nets, not from boats, at least in the fishing villages and islands near Beaufort.

Capt. Willis has always lived in Beaufort. However, he has worked on menhaden boats as far away as the Gulf of Mexico. We talked in Beaufort, just after he had finished a season of menhaden fishing in Moss Point, Mississippi.

One of the first of Farrell’s photographs that caught his eye was this image (above) of fishermen relaxing on the stern of a menhaden boat called the W.A. Mace. It brought back a lot of memories for him. His father had once been captain of the Mace, though probably not at the time that Farrell took the photograph.

In the photograph, the Mace is docked at the Beaufort Fisheries wharf on Taylors Creek in Beaufort.

Taking in her lines (in other photographs), Capt. Willis estimated that the Mace had the capacity to hold approximately 550,000 fish. Menhaden boat captains liked to come home with a full boat, and in those days they often did.

Pointing to the fisherman on the boat’s stern, Capt. Willis mused, “Must be Saturday afternoon.” In those days, the fishermen worked six days a week on the boats, then got paid off on Saturday afternoon and got to relax until first light on Monday morning.

Capt. Willis said this fisherman might have been living on the boat during the fishing season if he wasn’t from Beaufort. “He had a bunk and three meals a day,” he observed, and that was nothing to laugh at during the Great Depression.

Behind the fisherman, we can see a water barrel and quite a few bags of salt, Capt. Willis pointed out. The menhaden factory, where the fish were processed into fertilizer and oil, was just at the other end of the dock, and it had a “salt house,” he said.

At the end of every day of fishing, the fishermen soaked their nets in salt. “Pickling the nets,” it was called. The salt “killed off the slime,” Capt. Willis told me.

Another fisherman, King Davis, who you’ll meet below, told me that the salt also kept the nets supple and kept them from tearing and shredding the fisherman’s hands so bad, which was one of the banes of working in the nets in those days.

The salt came in 100-pound bags. The size of the bags led Capt. Willis to reminisce about a menhaden fisherman named Bill Neal, who was famous for showing off his strength by picking up a 100-pound bag of salt with his teeth.

The old cotton nets required a lot of care. Every menhaden company had its own “seine loft,” even if it was just on the dock, and a company’s net menders stayed busy. The boat’s crew did a lot of net mending too when they were fishing. Even after being tarred at the beginning of the fishing season, salted regularly and patched often, the old cotton nets generally only lasted a year or two, Capt. Willis told me.

At the time of this photograph, Capt. Willis explained, a captain didn’t necessarily need fishermen on his boat that could lift 100-pound bags of salt with their teeth, but “you had to have powerful, big strong men.”

That began to change at least some after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s, menhaden companies adopted power blocks, hydraulic lifts and other machinery on their boats. With those innovations, boats began having smaller crews and the fishermen no longer needed to have the kind of weight-lifter strength that the fishermen had before the war.

(That doesn’t mean that there weren’t some big and powerful men working in the nets after the war, though: there were plenty.)

The story of Bill Neal and the salt bags reminded Capt. Willis of some of the other local menhaden fishermen that were famous for their strength. One stood out. Bill Neal was a strong man, he told me, but he couldn’t compete with a fisherman named James Henry.

“He could pick up the whole factory,” Capt. Willis said, and he didn’t look like he was joking when he said it.

* * *

* * *

On another trip to Beaufort, I visited with Ernest “King” Davis, a long-time first mate for Beaufort Fisheries. At the time, he was 74 years old and retired, but he had worked on menhaden boats for 44 years.

Davis hails from North River, an African American community a little north of Beaufort. He is from a family of menhaden fishermen.

He told me that he had first gone menhaden fishing on his father’s boat when he was 15 years old. Over the decades, he became one of the most respected first mates in the menhaden industry.

Farrell took these photographs in 1938 or 1939. Davis wasn’t even born yet then, but he thought he recognized some of the fishermen in Farrell’s photographs from his early days working on menhaden boats.

Davis wasn’t sure, but four of the menhaden fishermen in Farrell’s photographs looked familiar to him.

The first was Gene Stanley, who he thought might be the fisherman sitting on the stern of the Mace in the photograph above.

Davis recalled that, when he was growing in Beaufort, Stanley was the mate and later the captain of one of Beaufort Fisheries’ sound boats (as opposed to “ocean boats”). “He knew what he was doing,” he told me.

When Davis was young, Stanley was a deacon at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Beaufort. He was, in Davis’s words, “well to do.” In addition to menhaden fishing, he owned a little grocery store and quite a few rental houses on Craven Street.

Davis told me that he wasn’t positive that the fisherman on the Mace’s stern was truly Stanley, but he immediately thought of Stanley when I showed him the photograph. “That’s where he typically sat and how he sat,” he remembered.

Davis thought that he also recognized three other menhaden fishermen in Farrell’s photographs of the W.A. Mace and its crew.

One of the men that Davis thought he recognized was Boot Dudley. He believed that Dudley was one of the men working the nets in one of the Mace’s purse boats in Farrell’s photographs of the fishermen in the waters off Beaufort. He looked so much younger in the 1930s than when Davis knew him that he could not be sure, but he thought it was him.

Dudley had been an important man in his life. When Davis had first gone menhaden fishing as a young man, Dudley had been one of his mentors, showing him the ropes and making sure he stayed out of trouble.

He said that Dudley and the other old timers at Beaufort Fisheries had worked him to the bone back then. “They were hard on me and they made me work,” he told me. He said he later appreciated it. “Those old men — they taught me well.”

Above all, he was grateful because they had taught him how to do the job safely. In all his years of menhaden fishing, Davis had never had a serious injury. He told me that he had not known many men in the industry that could say that.

Another fisherman that Davis thought that he recognized in Farrell’s photographs was Henry Bell. He believed Bell was “pulling net” in the mate’s boat (third from left in the photograph at the top of this section). “He was a good man,” he recalled. “Real quiet and would work.”

Davis said that Bell lived in Morehead City, on the other side of the Newport River from Beaufort. He remembered him attending St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church in Morehead.

The last man on the Mace that looked familiar to Davis was “Poppy” Frazier, who, judging from his last name, was from Craven Corner, a rural community 13 or 14 miles outside of Beaufort. A striking number of the town’s menhaden fishermen came from Craven Corner.

When Davis knew Frazier years later, he was the first mate on another of Beaufort Fisheries’ boats, the Taylor Creek.

“Them folk were strong people,” Davis told me, thinking about Frazier. “They liked to kill me.” He remembered Frazier being one of the strongest men in the industry. “He could pick up a 500-pound tom weight,” he said.

A “tom weight” is a heavy weight that menhaden fishermen toss overboard to close a purse seine. Attached to the seine with a heavy line, the tom weight functioned like the zipper on a woman’s purse, closing the net up with the fish inside—hence the names “purse boat” and “purse seine.”

Davis told me that a new fisherman was put “right on the cork,” but every man on a menhaden boat had to know his job and know it well or he’d put every other man in danger.

A big set of menhaden could be hundreds of thousands of fish. They might do anything. Perils were everywhere. Catching menhaden involved three boats — the big boat, or “mother boat,” and her two purse boats, and in those days a dozen men raising the purse seine out of the sea.

The fishermen had to work together. Every man had to know just what to do and when to do it. They were paid on shares and one wrong move and they could lose a week’s wages. Or somebody could get hurt bad.

As King Davis put it, “No time to play — if you didn’t know your job, you had to get a new job.”

* * *

Capt. David Willis, who we met earlier, spoke about menhaden fishing in much the same way. “It was a rhythm. It was like a ballet,” he insisted, smiling a little at himself for making the comparison.

This ballet had no conductor, however. When the fishermen were at work, neither the captain or first mate had time to tell the crew what to do or when to do it.

“There wasn’t time and there were too many contingencies — the weight of the fish, the wind, boat movements, a hundred things,” the captain said. The men drew on their own experience, and they used their own judgment.

To me he sounded a good deal like King Davis: “If you didn’t know your job, you didn’t get a job,” Capt. Willis stressed. “Everybody had his thing down pat.”

When Capt. Willis and I looked at Farrell’s photographs of the fishermen hauling in tons of of fish in a roiling sea, every man being pushed to his limit, each doing his job with astonishing precision and dexterity, I could see in his face how much he loved the excitement of it.

“When it worked right, boy was it fun!” Capt. Willis said, his eyes almost glowing, thinking no doubt of distant waters.

But then he added, perhaps thinking of a thousand mishaps and near disasters he had witnessed aboard his boats over the years, “But when everything goes wrong it’s no fun.”

* * *

A few months later, I was in Beaufort again. On this visit, I carried Charles Farrell’s photographs of menhaden fishing to Steve Goodwin, an amateur historian who I consider the foremost authority on the history of the menhaden industry in North Carolina.

Steve is an old friend and a person I always seek out when I want to understand more about the state’s menhaden industry.

He is from a local menhaden fishing family and worked on a menhaden boat summers when he was in college.

He never made a career out of menhaden fishing, but he has always been interested in the industry’s history. He has talked with many old timers, and he has done extensive research in archives and libraries around the U.S.

Steve is interested in every aspect of the menhaden industry’s history, so of course he was excited to see Farrell’s photographs.

The first of photograph that caught his attention was another photo of the menhaden boat W.A. Mace in Beaufort. In this photograph, we get a stern view of her at the Beaufort Fisheries dock on Taylors Creek 1938-39.

As soon as he saw the Mace, he immediately looked in a remarkable digital database that he has compiled on the state’s menhaden boats. He was quickly able to tell me that the W.A. Mace was built in the Meadows Shipyard in New Bern for the Atlantic Fishing Co. in 1925, but eventually ended up under the ownership of Beaufort Fisheries.

Steve’s records indicated that she was built mainly out of longleaf pine and white oak, was 87.1 feet in length and 30.3 feet in the beam and was powered by a 100 HP Fairbanks Morse single screw diesel engine.

She was named after one of Beaufort’s leading businessmen and civic leaders, William Arendell Mace. “Doc” Mace, as he was known, was president of both the Bank of Beaufort and one of the largest local menhaden companies, the Taylors Creek Fish and Oil Co., when they failed after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Mace was hardly unusual. I would not be surprised if every menhaden company in the state fail at some point during the Great Depression. In this case, another group of investors stepped in and bought the Taylors Creek Fish and Oil Co.’s assets and organized Beaufort Fisheries, the owner of the Mace at the time of this photograph, in 1933.

Steve and I then began looking closely at Farrell’s photograph of the Mace. On the left side of the photograph, he pointed to the net wheel. The Mace’s crew and menhaden factory’s hands used the wheel mostly for hanging the purse seines while they repaired them.

He also pointed to the bags of lime on the boat’s stern. They were used for “salting” or “pickling” the net. Beyond the salt bags, we can see barrels of drinking water, the purse boats on the boat’s starboard side, the davits for hoisting the purse boats and the hemp bumpers that kept the purse boats and the mother boat from chaffing when they rubbed up against one another.

Steve also walked me down the deck of the Mace. He pointed to the shelter over the boat’s engine room and, in front of the shelter, the boat’s hold, and then the pilothouse.

In the pilothouse, he said that you’d probably have found the officers’ bunks — the bunks for the captain, mate, engineer and pilot. Steve guessed that the Mace had its mess hall and crew quarters on the first deck, though some boats had crew bunks in the hull, rarely a comfortable place to bed.

Beyond the Mace, Steve pointed out a skiff, probably Harkers Island built by the look of her, with a man in the bow steering with his feet.

* * *

Back down in Southport, 100 miles south of Beaufort, I also shared Charles A. Farrell’s photographs of the menhaden industry with local historian Donnie Joyner.

Donnie is also also an old friend. He has been spearheading local efforts to highlight Southport’s African American history for years, and we’ve had several chances to work together.

One photograph immediately snagged his attention. In that photograph (above), a group of fishermen are playing checkers at the mess table on the W. A. Anderson, one of the Brunswick Navigation Co.’s menhaden boats in Southport.

Donnie was especially excited to see the photograph because he recognized his uncle, Joe Reaves, as the last fisherman on the far side of the mess table.

With a little local research, Donnie later identified the rest of the fishermen at the table and called me with their names.

Thanks to Donnie, I now know that the fishermen at the table, from right, are Raphael Parker, Joseph Parker, Donnie’s uncle Joe Reaves, Frank Jackson and Elmer Davis and Elias “Nehi” Gore.

You will remember that Gore was the legendary, 7-foot., 8-inch tall fisherman that I introduced at the beginning of this story.

Behind the fishermen playing checkers, we can see the Anderson’s captain, John D. Eriksen.

A Norwegian immigrant, Eriksen came to the U.S. in 1906. He was nationalized as a U.S. citizen in 1916 and served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. After the war, he returned home and went menhaden fishing.

Menhaden fisherman Charles “Pete” Joyner, whom I introduced earlier, recalled Capt. Eriksen as “quiet natured.”

In another of Farrell’s photographs, we can see the mess table on another menhaden boat, probably the W.A. Mace out of Beaufort. This time the fishermen are sitting down to a meal.

Time on a menhaden boat had its own rhythms, different than those on shore, and mealtimes were part of that rhythm. On “boat time,” breakfast was at 5 a.m., lunch at 10 a.m. and dinner at 3 p.m. That was true then, and it’s still true on menhaden boats today.

One of the things I like most about Farrell’s photographs, and perhaps the most important reason that I keep going back to them, is that he was drawn to these kinds of simple, ordinary moments in life.

They are the moments that usually remain unseen in historical photographs, but Farrell was drawn to them: children playing, mothers and daughters working in a shrimp house, fishermen playing checkers on a menhaden boat.

They’re hauntingly rare in other kinds of historical records, too. I love that Farrell turned his camera toward them, and I love even more that he found so much beauty in them.

Special thanks from the author

I would like to thank the following people for so generously sharing their time and knowledge with me: Ernest “King” Davis in Beaufort, Steve Goodwin in Beaufort, Donnie Joyner in Southport, the late Charles “Pete” Joyner in Southport, Jimmy and Mae Moore on Oak Island, Tookie Potter in Southport and Capt. David Willis in Beaufort.

I also want to extend a special thanks to Barbara Garrity-Blake in Gloucester. Her work with the state’s menhaden fishermen is always an inspiration to me.

In addition, I got a tremendous lot of help from an extraordinary archivist, Kim Andersen at the State Archives of North Carolina (now retired), and from a no less extraordinary museum leader, Lori Sanderlin at the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport. 

Finally, I’d like to thank the Southport Historical Society and the William Madison Randall Library at UNC-Wilmington for making the John D. Eriksen Collection available to me. 

Thank you all so much. Writing history is such a joy when I get to spend time with the likes of you.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

At the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, I found a remarkable collection of oral history interviews from the North Carolina coast during the Great Depression.

They included a seaman from Ocracoke, a country doctor from Lake Mattamuskeet, a Norwegian dredge boatman in Beaufort, a washerwoman in Elizabeth City and many more.

They ranged from the high to the low. I found an interview with the proprietor of a clothing goods store that saw the history of the Great Depression through changes in fashion and how people shopped.

But I also found an interview that showed me the hard times of the 1930s through the eyes of a young, single mother who made her living as a sex worker in a Wilmington brothel.

In this post, I would like to share excerpts from nine of those interviews. Each gives us a glimpse of life on the North Carolina coast that we don’t usually find in history books.

All of the interviews were done by the Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of what is often called President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Second New Deal.” Dating to 1935-36, the “Second New Deal” included the creation of some of the most popular legislation in U. S. history, including Social Security and rural electrification.

But the “Second New Deal” also included lesser-known programs that only lasted as long as the Great Depression. One of them was the Federal Writers’ Project, which provided jobs for unemployed historians, teachers, writers, librarians and other white-collar workers across the United States.

You can find transcripts of the Federal Writers’ Project’s oral history interviews in two collections at the Southern Historical Collection: the Federal Writers’ Project Papers and the Thadeus Farree Papers.

The ones I’m sharing here represent only a tiny fraction of the more than 1,200 Federal Writers’ Project interviews that you can read when you visit UNC Libraries. Many of them are now available online, too. Roughly a hundred of the interviews were conducted on the North Carolina coast. The rest are the stories of people who lived across the American South.

These are only nine people’s lives, but they each speak to the history of the Great Depression for countless others on the North Carolina coast and beyond. If you are like me, you will not soon forget them.

* * *

Dr. Arthur G. Harris, Fairfield

I want to begin with an excerpt of an interview with a country doctor named Arthur G. Harris. He was interviewed by W.O. Saunders, a legendary newspaper editor and publisher who worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s. They talked at Dr. Harris’s home in Fairfield, a remote village in Hyde County.

“This country has come upon hard times,” Dr. Harris began. “Eighty percent — yes, eighty percent — of the people in this county can’t pay for a doctor’s visit or for his medicine. Hundreds of them on WPA make barely enough to feed and clothe themselves wretchedly. Their poverty is heartbreaking.

The Works Progress Administration, or WPA) was a New Deal agency that provided public works jobs to more than 8.5 million unemployed and underemployed workers in the U.S. between 1935 and the early 1940s. In many of North Carolina’s coastal communities, few families did not have at least one individual employed by the WPA at some point during the Great Depression.

“I went into a home the other day — if you could call it a home — in which there was not a chair to sit on. I asked for a teaspoon — they didn’t have a teaspoon.

“I know of a family who, resolved to get out of debt, lived practically on cornbread for a year. No sugar, no flour, no butter, no tea, no coffee.

“I know families in which the mother, father and several children will huddle in one bed to keep from freezing to death in winter, because there are not enough beds or covering to go around. …

“Well things got so tight with me back in 1932 that I decided to leave my automobile in its garage until times got better. I have never owned an automobile since.

“Of course ,you are wondering how a country doctor can get along without an automobile. That was a question that puzzled me too until I was forced to lay my car up. But it was costing me $50 a month to run that automobile and I wasn’t getting enough out of my practice to keep up the expense of it and buy my drugs….

“I had an arrangement with a neighbor who would put his car at my disposal when I needed it. …

“It has been seven years since I laid that car up, and I have never driven it or owned an automobile since. …

“It went away piece by piece until finally there was so little left of it that two men picked up what was left of it, put it on a truck and took it to the junk pile.

“The car was in first rate condition when I laid it up, and I might have sold it for a fair price…. I thought I would resume the use of it when times got better, but times didn’t get better and neighbors, knowing the car was laid up, would run over and borrow from it whenever they needed a spare part.

“In a few years they had got all the tires, the rims, the battery, the generator, the carburetor, even the seat cushions. And then one day a neighbor came in to ask me if I’d let him have the engine block.”

* * *

A young mother, Wilmington

Another Federal Writers’ Project worker interviewed one of the many young women who felt that they had no choice but to enter the sex trade during the Great Depression. At the time, she was apparently working in Chapel Hill, but she had first worked in a brothel in a coastal seaport, Wilmington, which is why I’m including her story here. The interviewer kept her name confidential.

“That’s funny you want to know about my life,” the young woman told the man that interviewed her for the Federal Writers’ Project. “Most men don’t ask any questions except maybe, `How much?’ or “Are you clean?’ They just come and go and don’t say much.”

She had grown up in one of the state’s cotton mill villages where times had been hard and childhood was no picnic.

She asked the interviewer, “Did you ever go down in the slums of a factory town and watch the kids to see what they were doing when they weren’t working in the mills?

“Did you ever see kids not much higher than your knee prowling around at night, dumping over garbage cans trying to find a piece of bread or scrap of meat to eat?

“Did you ever see them begging a peddler for his rotten apples or fighting over what little they could get?

“Well I did. I was born and raised in a place like that, and I did my share of stringing tobacco sacks for 20 cents a day.

“Do you think I want my little boy to grow up in a place like that? Not on your life! I’ve seen too much of it!

“Do you think I’d let my little boy run around with a gang of young thieves who didn’t care about anything except stealing tires from cars and playing around at night with girls that had God knows what?

“I’ve been through it and I know what it’ll do to you. They used to come after me and try to take me out into the woods….”

To find a better childhood for her little son, the woman located a school for orphans and foster children in the North Carolina mountains for him.

From little clues in her interview, I assume that our unnamed mother was referring to the Crossnore School, which was founded by a pair of physicians, Mary Martin Sloop and her husband Eustace Sloop, in Avery County in 1913.

But she had to pay for the child to stay at the school and she couldn’t find a way to pay the fee. She had him out of wedlock. She had met the boy’s father when they were in college, but he had died in a car wreck. She later remarried, but her husband’s business went bankrupt after the Stock Marsh Crash in 1929 and he committed suicide. She had no one left to help her take care of her son.

She looked for jobs, but in the Great Depression that was incredibly difficult and harder yet for a single woman raising a child on her own.

Then things got even worse. Her child came down with meningitis and needed hospital care that she could not possibly afford. She felt the walls closing in on her, and her choices vanishing.

In her distress, she remembered a woman that she had met some time earlier. The woman, Nina, had told her that she ran a brothel in Wilmington.

“I was determined that my child was going to have the best treatment, regardless of what happened to me. I went to the telephone and called Nina in Wilmington. The next morning I received a wire from her with train fare in it.

“Well, you see that’s how I got started. I didn’t want to, and I detested the thought of it, but I was going to do anything to save my baby. I didn’t count any longer. My baby was all that mattered.

“I stayed at Nina’s about six months, and then the law came in and closed her up. I never knew what happened to her after I left, but I went from one town to another and I stopped at only the best hotels in every town….”

Many of the women she knew in the sex trade did what they had to do to survive, but of course they didn’t always make it.

“I was in a hotel at —–ville when two girls that were staying there tried to commit suicide. . .. They were both drunk on dope. In fact, they had been taking it ever since they’d been there.

“Well after they treated them both over at the hospital, they brought them back to the hotel . . .. A few days later two policemen came in and took them to jail….

“We never had much trouble with the law because they can almost always be bought off…. I thought we had to pay too much, but the cops always said they had to give the big boys their cut.”

* * *

Rev. E. C. Shue, Robersonville

Small things meant a lot during the Great Depression. Almost nothing was being built: lumber mills grew silent, brickyards were abandoned, homes that were half-built at the time of the Stock Market Crash in 1929 often remained unfinished for a decade or longer for want of money to buy lumber, nails or other construction materials.

Under those circumstances, even the building of a little Baptist church was a small miracle.

This interviewee is the Rev. E.C. Shue, a Baptist minister. The date of the interview was Jan. 18, 1939. The place is Robersonville, in Martin County. Rev. Shue was called to serve a church there in the bleakest years of the Great Depression.

“In the fall of 1932 we moved to this city. The church here had been without a pastor for two years. However, the Sunday school was attracting large crowds.

“The equipment in the church was very little, and the building itself was badly in need of repairs. It was just a one-room building to which two very small rooms had been added behind the pulpit for the Sunday school.

“The church auditorium was crossed up with wires for curtains which made a very ragged appearance. There were about a dozen different colors of glass in the windows, and there was no shrubbery on the grounds.

“I learned that several years back they had talked of building (a new church), but hard times and (the) Depression got them. All hope of getting a church were vanished.

“The Ladies Aid had some money, and some suggestion was made to use this on repairs. I saw there was absolutely no interest in building a church soon. Tobacco was very cheap (which of course was bad for tobacco farmers), and peanuts sold for 7/8ths of a cent a pound.

“Under prevailing conditions it looked like all the church could do would be to maintain one Sunday service a month.

“Seeing that all were so sure that a building could not be undertaken, I thought it was a good time to prove our faith in God and show our loyalty for His cause.

“The last week in January 1933, I showed some people some church plans and asked them to build. Some laughed and said it could not be done. All agreed it was a bad time to start a thing like that.

“Well, on March 6, the old church began to come down. When the morning papers came, they carried large headlines—ALL BANKS CLOSED. That was by order of President Roosevelt.

After a month-long run on the nation’s banks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday on March 6, 1933 and closed all banks. Three days later, the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, which guaranteed bank deposits for the first time and restored confidence in the banking system. The country’s banks re-opened on March 13, 1933. 

“Some of the folks got scared and wanted to stop the building until things got better, but it was too late. Half of the roof was off by 9 o’clock, so the work went on.

“The largest personal gift was $500 down to 5 cents. Some folks gave timber, some gave labor and some sent a hand to work a day. The pastor was put in charge of the construction. It was not long until the enthusiasm was running at high pitch.

Between the stock market crash in 1929 and the National Bank Holiday in 1933, 215 North Carolina banks failed. For long periods, some of the state’s coastal counties had no banks left in business. 

“The building is stucco finish, the cement blocks being made on the grounds. My brother and I worked together, using his machinery in making the blocks.

“The ladies of the church gave us dinner and supper, and people came in great numbers to see the work go on. Some were friends and some were strangers. Salesmen coming to town heard of the work and came by to see it.

“Once started, never did the interest lag. The pastor gave his labor, planned the interior and carried the work on when the money gave out, using lumber out of the old church.

“We set out to complete the auditorium and finish the basement and Sunday school rooms later.

“But all went along together…. We were in the new church the last Sunday in August….”

* * * 

John H. Bunch, Elizabeth City

In April 1939 W.O. Saunders interviewed a man named John H. Bunch at his home in Elizabeth City. Saunders identified Bunch as a “negro saw-mill hand.”

“I was born and raised on a farm down in Perquimans County. My father was a tenant farmer and a hard worker. He taught his children to work. I worked on the farm until I was 19 years old.

“Then I worked on a ground mill run by a Mr. Old…. I worked for him about three years. He paid me a dollar and 25 cents a day. That was good money in them days, but I was young and didn’t save much.

“After working for him about three years I had saved $35 and bought a horse and went to farming for myself. I farmed on shares…– I guess you’d call it about 15 acres.

“First year I raised 3 bales of cotton, 20 bags of peanuts and about 15 barrels of corn, beside my ‘taters and peas and a little garden stuff. Raised me two or three pigs, too. The landlord took one-third of the cotton, the corn and the peanuts….

“But cotton wasn’t worth but about $30 a bale, peanuts about $2.50 a bag and corn only a dollar a barrel. It took all my corn to feed the horse and the pigs.

According to Douglass Carl Abrams and Randall E. Parker in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, crop prices fell by more than half in North Carolina between 1929 and 1933. Many farmers lost their land. Many, like Mr. Bunch, moved into towns to work in sawmills and cotton mills if they could find a job. In many of the state’s coastal counties, more than one-third of the people were on relief.

“But all years wasn’t as good as the first year. There were wet years when I hardly raised nothing and would have gone hungry if I hadn’t worked in the logwoods and for other farmers when I got caught up with my own work. I could always find work.

“But good years or bad years, there weren’t no way to get ahead on that farm. Landlord made us trade at his store. End of the year when settling up time came, I’d come in and he’d say, `John, old fellow, you got right up to the fence this year but didn’t quite get over….

“I was always in debt to that white man. And then he asked me if I was going to stay with him another year.

“If I said yes, he’d holler to his store clerk to let me a barrel of flour, a side of meat, some lard and molasses and a bolt of yellow cottons, some calico, a suit of overalls and brogan shoes.

“If I said I wasn’t going to stay, I didn’t get no provisions and he would send and take the last peck of corn that I kept for my share of the crop. He was a hard man….

“I’d been farming about two years when I married my first wife. She was a big help until she got sickly. She only lived about eight years after we were married. It was before she died that I gave up farming and moved to town so she could be near a doctor.

“There was no doctor near where we lived, and living was mighty hard too. We didn’t have much of a house, just a two-room, weather-boarded shack, not ceiled inside, with a kitchen set off from the house.

“We cooked in a fireplace. You’d be surprised what good biscuits my wife could bake in a skillet with a heavy iron cover on it.

“I came to town about 1907. It was January. Didn’t have hardly enough money to get here, but we didn’t own nothing and didn’t have much to move. Two dray loads took it all.

“I got a job at Foreman-Blades Mill where I’m still working, handling boards on the yard at a dollar and a quarter a day, working 11 hours a day.

“My wife died the August we moved here. We had four children, but two of them had died. My mother was living then and she agreed to take the two children that was living, and I broke up housekeeping.

“But after 18 months boarding, I got married again, married a cousin of my first wife.

“We rented a house and got along pretty good with my wife helping. She was always a mighty good field hand and a lot of times she could make more money than I could make, picking peas, digging ‘taters, picking cotton….”

In the 1920s, when the mill was booming, Bunch borrowed $1,000 worth of lumber from the mill owner to build a house. He had saved another $600.

“I took my $600 and bought the bricks, the shingles, nails, paint and hardware and hired my labor and built this house. It took me eight years to pay for that lumber. Interest eats you up. And then about the time I got that lumber paid for, they began to cut wages—first 50 cents a day, then another 50 cents, then another cut, until they got me down to a dollar and 40 cents a day.”

He was describing the beginning of the Great Depression. Banks closed. Unemployment rose. Businesses went bankrupt. Wages were cut, and there were mass lay-offs. People lost homes.

“Them was tight times…. If I hadn’t had this house paid for, I would have lost it. But praise the Lord, I had my house all paid for and had bought the lot side of it for a garden.

“But it was tight times. My wife toted her end, but there ain’t but so many days a woman can find work in the field…. We scrimped along somehow. Didn’t eat much meat: a chicken when we could get it, stew beef when we could get it, a mess of fish once in a while, but mostly just salt pork, sweet ‘taters, flour, cornmeal, molasses, sugar and a little butter. We never went hungry, but we had to pinch and scrape to get along….”

* * *

Capt. Otto Olsen, Beaufort

The Federal Writers’ Project interviewed Otto Olsen, a Norwegian dredge boat captain, on May 4, 1939. Capt. Olsen lived in Beaufort, but at the time he was staying on the dredge boat Callie while doing a job in New Bern. His is one of dozens of interviews in the Federal Writers’ Project Papers that sheds light on the history of immigrants on the North Carolina coast during the Great Depression.

“I was born in a little town of 14,000 inhabitants 56 years ago,” Capt. Olsen began his story. That was on a dairy farm in Norway in or about 1883.

He was one of a sizable group of Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch immigrants who settled in Beaufort in the early 1900s. Most made their livings as fishermen, sailors and boatmen.

You can learn more about those immigrants in my stories “Letters from Oivind’s Son” and “The Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch Fishermen of Beaufort, N.C.”

“I did not like the farm,” Capt. Olsen went on. “My father was never at the sea, but all my uncles on both sides was at the sea and all my grandfathers on both sides as far as I know was at the sea.

“I had one great-uncle who was in the great British Navy — a captain he was, and we thought him a famous great man. So I went to sea when I was 13 years old and for only three weeks in the next seven years did I stay on the land.

“You say you want the story of my life and I am going to give it to you. But I have been so much places and seen so much things that I can’t always remember. I have been in every country in the world that has a seaport and I have been all the way around the world three times….

“I live in North Carolina now. That is, my wife, she stays here, right across from the Episcopal academy.

“She has a garden and chickens and roomers. And if you will come to see me down there sometimes I will take you for fishing.

“I stay wherever my work is, which is right here now on this dredge boat. . .. I married a woman when I was working on the dredge boat cutting the Inland Waterway. We don’t have any children of our own. But we both wanted lots (of) children, so we adopt two orphans, one boy and one girl. We send them to schools and to church….

Many other couples also met when dredge boat crews dug the Intracoastal Waterway through what had been remote coastal communities. They included Douglass and Dessie Sabiston, my great-uncle and aunt.

“I am a Lutheran but there is hardly a Lutheran church over where I am now, so I go to the Episcopal Church like my wife. . .. You may hear me cuss like a son-of-a-bitch when I am working, but I always like to honor my father and mother by going to church. And all these years at the sea I say my prayers every night.

“I have had to fight some sumabitches in the fo’c’sle about my prayers and my reading. I did not go to much school, but I have read much good books and we sent the boy and girl through high school. We wanted them to have more learning than we had. It is good for them and you have much good schools in this country.

“When I was at sea whenever we made a port I went to a reading room and got me much good books. They have helped me much. I read Mark Twain and Victor Hugo most…. That Jean Valjean was a sumabitch but I liked him….

Jean Valjean is of course the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. 

“I was shipwrecked three times: once in the Baltic Sea, and once off the coast of Siberia and once in the Gulf of Mexico. But the Gulf of Mexico was the worst. In that wreck I was the only one of 39 on board that was saved.

“I had been sailing two years on a British (ship) off the China coast when I got . . . orders to report light for a cargo of cotton for Liverpool. We weighed anchor at Shanghai, come straight down the coast, touched at Ceylon for water and coal and then crossed the tip of the Indian Ocean, on through the Red Sea and the (Suez) Canal, called again at Port Said, then through the Mediterranean and on across the Atlantic without so much as a heavy blow.

“We anchored at Hampton Roads a few days for engine repairs, cooled and watered. Then we headed out by Cape Henry and straight down the coast for Galveston.

“We were well in the Gulf when a squall covered us just out of Sabine Pass. That was the worst I have ever seen in 32 years at the sea.

“The seas were so heavy and we were so light in the hold that the propellers would not stay under the water and they raced until the shafts were broken and we was helpless adrift. The (ship) was old and as they say, ‘she couldn’t take it.’

“Her starboard slates, forward, buckled, and in less than 20 minutes we had nine feet of water in the hold and two bulkheads gone.

“Two of the lifeboats was crushed on the deck by the swells breaking over and of the two we got over (the side) one of them was swamped with all hands going down.

“The other pulled away with eleven men and they were never seen again.

“The rest of us, eight sailors, one Swede and four Portuguese negroes, made a raft from old kegs and spare planking lashed together.

“But when the raft was ready something inside me deep told me not to go—and so I am alive today. All the 12 men on that raft died in the sea and I, the thirteenth one, was saved and alive!

“But it was some son-of-a-bitch time I can tell you. The storm did not last so long and by next sunlight the sea was calm but the ship was so low in the water that a small swell would wash her main deck from stem to stern.

“I had on a lifebelt and was atop the charthouse just thinking and looking, and there was nothing to eat or drink, but all the time something inside me kept telling me I would be saved.

“It was about eight-thirty that morning when I was sighted by a tank ship. I didn’t have to make any signals as it was clear and calm and she was passing close to starboard and they could see it was a sinking ship and a man aboard. …

“I got some dry, clean clothes on the tank ship from the crew and when we made port I hobo-ed my way. I was young then and didn’t mind such things.

“I got to Galveston late one afternoon. I went to a cheap saloon and bummed a drink. I have drinked liquor and had women in almost every country in the world. But I never drank myself drunk, and that other was before I was married.

“I went from the saloon to the docks and knocked around. And who should I see but an old friend of mine—a Norwegian who had married an old schoolmate back in the homeland.

“He was working as a stevedore and making $10 a day. He told me he had a good home and he wanted me to come visit with him. I was glad to go for I was broke….

“Well I went with my friend to his house up the railroad tracks. We got there about four-thirty and we hadn’t been there long before it started getting dark. The chickens started crowing and the cows to lowing and the dogs come on the porch with their hair bristled up. Everything looked and sounded strange and quiet.

“Then the wind began to blow, then harder and harder, and the rain come down in sheets.

“We looked out the downstairs window and we saw water rising in the yard. In a little while it was over the front porch and in the front hall. We had to move upstairs.

“We carried the animals — all of them hogs, cows, dogs, chickens — up the stairs to two big rooms….

“When it was nine o’clock I stuck my hand out the window and could reach down and dip my finger in the water.

“This was the great Galveston Flood that I was living through, but we didn’t know it then. Thirteen thousand, five hundred lives were lost there.

The Great Galveston Hurricane hit the Texas coast in September 1900, drowning thousands, demolishing approximately 7,000 buildings in Galveston and leaving more than a quarter of the city’s population homeless. It was the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. 

“Over 20 millionaires was trapped and killed in the Exchange Building alone. And many other brick builders were brought down, but the frame buildings where the poor people lived were spared by the storm and the rich people was killed.

“And not a single whore in all the big red light district was killed, while good women was killed in churches….

“You may wonder why I am working on dredge boats after all my years at the sea. But I was getting older and decided that I had seen enough of the world for a while and wanted to stay longer in one place.

“So I got me a job in this country and in this state working on a $750,000 dredge boat that was dredging the Inland Waterway.

“The pay was good — much better than sailing on a tramp (steamer)…. And I am glad to have the job. The pay is enough for me and my wife. She owns the house and we don’t take much to live….

“I like your country and I want to stay here now. Always. There are places that I have been in other parts of the world that I think I would sometimes like to go back to, to see again, but I would always want to go back to here….

Capt. Olsen passed away in 1956 and is buried in Oceanview Cemetery in Beaufort.

* * *

S.S. Nixon, Stumpy Point

In March of 1939, Federal Writers’ Project interviewer W.O. Saunders talked with S.S. Nixon, a 75-year-old fisherman in Stumpy Point, a remote fishing village on the mainland of Dare County. 

“I was born in Engelhard, in Hyde County, in 1864, just a year before the close of the Civil War. My father was a seagoing man, the captain of his own vessel. He also owned a farm. I worked the farm until I was 22 years old.

“There was a lot of hard work and little money in farming. We couldn’t get much for the things we raised.

“In the winter of 1886, a man who had come over to Engelhard from Stumpy Point got caught by the Big Freeze and stayed with us until the ice in the creek broke up. He talked about the good fishing at Stumpy Point and begged me to come over and fish with him.

“It takes two men, sometimes more, to handle a stand of nets. I had done a little fishing, knew how to handle a boat and there wasn’t anything in farming. And so that spring I came to Stumpy Point and have lived here ever since….

“There were mighty few pound nets when I came here 52 years ago. Most of the fishing was done with gill nets. There wasn’t a gas engine in the county. We used sailboats entirely.

“We’d get out about daybreak to go to our nets and if luck was with us we’d get back before nightfall. But there were times when we struck a dead calm and had to use our wooden sails (oars!) and we’d do pretty well if we got in at 9 or 10 o’clock at night….

“But fishing was good in those days. There weren’t so many fishermen and nothing like the number of nets you see in the sounds now. We never set our nets more than 12 miles from home — often not more than 8 or 10.

“Now, with our gas boats and so much competition, we have to spread out and it is not unusual for a man to have his stand of nets 40 miles away.

“We considered a catch of 200 or 300 shad to a stand of nets a good day’s work back in the (1890s)…. Now we consider 50 or 75 shad a good day’s catch….

“But to get back to my own life: I hadn’t been here but about two years when I got married and went to fishing for myself.

“Shortly after that I built this house. Did most of the work on it myself, with some help from the neighbors. Back in those days if a man built a house or a boat, his neighbors pitched in and helped. It ain’t that way now. If you want a thing done and you need help, you hire a man and pay him.

“No I haven’t put electric lights in my house. I’ve got running water in the kitchen and we have a radio. My wife enjoys it….

“We’ve got along with oil lamps all our lives and when the power line came about a year ago I decided we wouldn’t change from oil lamps now. But most everybody went crazy for them and I know a lot who have them who can’t pay the bills when they came around. Electric lights are just another one of those things that make living more expensive.

“But it’s the automobile that has ruined things. Tbere are families here who spend more on their automobiles than they do on their living…. And this riding up and down the country and young people riding nights is breaking up homes and hurting our churches. There isn’t the interest in churches there used to be….

“When I came to this village 52 years ago, we didn’t have but three miles of road and not much of a road at that. We were cut off from the outside world by swamps and water– all travel was by sailboat.

“When we finished our spring fishing, we would pile the family on a schooner and go to Elizabeth City to lay in our supplies for the rest of the year. We never thought of making less than a week of it.

“Sometimes we would be becalmed and it would take five days to make the trip to town. But (we) enjoyed it. Nobody was in a hurry. We took life as we found it….

“But I was happy then and I am happy now. Never had much sickness, always lived within my means, never let bad habits get a hold on me — never smoked half a dozen cigarettes in my life and smoke a cigar maybe once a month, but I chew my tobacco.

“Life was hard on the farm after the Civil War, when I was a boy: worked early and late and got little for your work except the coarsest sort of clothes and mighty plain eating.

“Fishing was hard too, but there was excitement in it and you enjoyed your sleep after a hard day of it on the water. And when you got home to a hot meal, if it were nothing more than fried salt pork, cornbread and sweet potatoes, it tasted good….

“No radios, no moving pictures, but church services meant something to us and a few young folks gathered around a parlor organ in the evening, singing the old hymns by lamplight, was mighty satisfying.

“I was a grown young man before I ever saw a steamboat or a railroad train and I have lived to see the gas boat, the automobile, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the radio and the flying machine. And they are cooking by electricity that comes over a little string of wire from way off yonder somewhere.

“But some things don’t change: the old truths and the old faith that men live by never change: hard work, soberness, truth, honesty and faith in God are as good for us today as they were when I first saw the light of day.

“And we live longer to enjoy our blessings. When I was a boy, a woman was old at 30 and men were crippled and bent and ready to die when they were 50 or 55.

“I haven’t many more years to live now. My time is about up, but I am not afraid to die and I have no regrets. The world has given me back in good measure about everything I put into it…. Life doesn’t owe me anything.”

 * * *

Isaac O’Neal, Ocracoke

Another W.O. Saunders interview was with Isaac “Big Ike” O’Neal on Ocracoke Island, one of the Outer Banks, in the summer of 1939. Born on the island 1865, he had been a sailor, coastguardsman and merchant. After his father was crippled in an accident aboard a ship, his family struggled to get by. O’Neal only went to school for four months in his entire life and started working young.

“I remember the first money I ever made,” O’Neal remembered. “There was a clam factory here on the island. The man who owned it paid 25 cents a basket for a 5-pick basket of clams.

“I was eight years old. I took a yawl boat and went to Hatteras to get clams. Was gone two weeks and came back with 13 bushels. The man paid me 75 cents, the first money I ever made.

“And that wasn’t (real) money — the clam factory man paid off with due bills that you had to trade out at his store. I got three 25 cent due bills.

“How did I feed myself during the two weeks I was away from home? Well, I started out with 2 or 3 pones of cornbread, some sweet potatoes and a cask of water.“

“I took along my steel and flint. Clams were plentiful and two or three times I would catch me a fish and broil it over the coals after I made a fire. Slept on the beach rolled up in the sailcloth which I had taken off the yawl when I tied up for the night.

“I declare, I don’t know why a lot of us weren’t drowned in those days. About the only boats we had were yawls, the small boats we picked up from ships that were wrecked on the island. We’d boat around the sounds in those little boats in all kinds of weather. Nothing unusual to be away from home for a week or two weeks at a time.

“Yawl boats were just one of the godsends that shipwrecks sent us. We had to depend on shipwrecks for most of our luxuries. A shipwreck brought us rope, timber, hardware, cooking utensils, fuel wood and, often, food and clothing.

“I remember when the Pioneer, an Old Dominion Line steamer, came ashore and broke up. (That was in October 1889.) Most of her cargo washed out to sea, but enough came ashore for everybody on the island to lay in all sorts of supplies.

“There were hams and bacon, canned goods, coffee, yard goods, buckets, brooms, baskets and almost anything you could think of. It was a sight to see….

“When I was 14 years old, I shipped on a two-mast schooner, the Annie Farrow. She was built right here on the island. We had a heavy stand of timber on the island in those days — oak and red cedar, no pine.

“I got $8.00 a month. It was a hard life — got plenty of grub, such as it was — salt pork, beans, bread and molasses. But it was a hard life in good weather and awful in foul weather.

“The only clothes I had were the ones I stood in — a homemade wool suit that my mother had made from yarn she had carded, spun and loomed herself. I remember when we sailed out of Hatteras Inlet on that first trip I thought I’d freeze….

“The richest I ever felt in my life was when I was 19 years old. We had landed in Bangor, Maine, with a cargo of lumber. The captain paid us off and my pay was $73 cash money, the most money I had ever seen at one time in my life.”

* * *

George A. Twiddy, Elizabeth City

W. O. Saunders interviewed George A. Twiddy on Jan. 12, 1939. Mr. Twiddy was the senior partner at a clothing and dry goods store called Twiddy & White in Elizabeth City. I love how he sees the history of his times through the lens of fashion, clothes and the experience of shopping.

“It was the year of the total eclipse of the sun — 1900, I think it was — when I went to work for C.H. Robinson’s Fair Store. I worked mornings and afternoons before and after school and the full day on Saturdays. I was 16 years old. My pay was $1.50 a week.

“My principal job was cleaning spittoons. Spittoons were important fixtures in all stores in those days. It seemed to me that most men chewed tobacco and many women dipped snuff and were not ashamed of it. Many of our women customers used those spittoons freely.

“Shopping was different in those days. There were no automobiles. The farmer took a day off to come to town. He would leave home around daybreak, spend the greater part of the day in town, leaving town after noon and getting home around sundown. He didn’t come to town often and his shopping list contained many items.

“Often as not he brought his wife with him. Stools were provided at regular intervals in front of the counters for the convenience of patrons.

“And between stools were oversize spittoons. We didn’t call them cuspidors. There were 22 spittoons in Robinson’s Fair Store, including the spittoons in the office.

”In front of every store were hitching posts for the convenience of our rural customers. It was not unusual for a farmer to drive up with his horse and buggy, or horse and cart, at 9 o’clock in the morning and leave his horse tied until he had finished his business town at 3 or 4 o’clock that afternoon.

“At noon he would put a bundle of fodder and eight ears of corn down for his nag … and let her feed. The horse droppings were prolific and as soon as I showed up at the store in the afternoon, if I didn’t think of it first, Mr. Robinson would suggest that I should clean up after the horses.

“The streets were not paved. In places they were knee deep in mud in winter. In dry weather every passing vehicle stirred up clouds of dust. The merchants in our block had combined to build a water tank in the neighborhood from which ran a one-Inch iron pipe providing spigots on every storefront.

“With a 50 ft. length of garden hose we sprinkled the street twice a day and kept down much of the dust. Part of my job was sprinkling the street in front of the store,

“Stairs were lighted with kerosene oil lamps with bright metal reflectors. Most stores opened early mornings and closed at 9 o’clock at night. It was part of my job too to keep the lamp chimneys cleaned and polished.

“I was employed at Robinson*s less than two years when (the) Sawyer & Jones Hardware Store just across the street offered me $1.50 a week. Their offer appealed to me because they had fewer spittoons to clean and fewer hitching posts, which meant less chambermaid work for fewer horses….

“My next job was with Jones, Harper & Co., dealers in dry goods, clothing, notions, hats, boots and shoes. I was getting along.

“It wasn’t long before I was offered a better job with Owens Shoe Co. I left Owens Shoe Co. in 1907 to go with … R.J. Mitchell, the largest and busiest department store in town.

“I was a full-fledged shoe salesman then. I was with Mitchell’s for seven years, until 1914, when I engaged with my partner in the present business which we have carried on ever since.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes in merchandising and social customs in my 39 years of mercantile experience.

“Thirty or 40 years ago most women made their own dresses and undergarments or employed neighborhood dress makers. Most boys clothing and men’s trousers were homemade….

“Silk hosiery was a luxury. Sheer silk and chiffon hosiery unknown.

“There was no such thing as a woman’s custom-made hat. A woman bought a frame, so much velvet, so many yards of ribbon, certain feathers or flowers, and a milliner designed her hat to her individual notions.

“The array of such fanciful headwear in a church auditorium on a Sunday morning was a sight to behold.

“Hourglass corsets, bustles and bust forms were the height of fashion. Women even padded their coiffures with rolls of hair called ‘rats’. They wore skirts that trailed the ground and a man had to wait for a rainy day to get a glimpse of a feminine ankle.
“A man never knew what sort of figure he was courting in those days. But once matrimony admitted him to the privacy of his lady’s boudoir, what a kick he got out of seeing the lady go through the ritual of disrobing!

“. . . It took countless buttons, hooks and eyes and pins to put a woman together in those days. Even their hats were held on their heads with long stiletto-like steel or brass pins.

“The other day I was on an automobile ride, with five women in the car and I wanted a pin. There wasn’t a pin among the five of them. The modern miss releases a snap, shrugs her shoulders and drops her clothes with the nonchalance of a molting hen giving herself a shake and dropping a feather.

“A lot of water has gone under the bridge since I first went behind a counter. The merchant used to get his goods in wooden packing cases. The wooden packing case is almost a thing of the past. Almost everything today comes in paper cartons….

“It isn’t safe for a small merchant to buy in heavy packing case quantities anymore, on account of the changing styles.

“Take shoes for instance; the traveling salesmen used to come twice a year with their sample lines. We bought our fall and winter shoes in the spring, our spring and summer shoes in the fall. We can’t do that anymore.

“The manufacturers are developing new styles every few weeks. No one can tell what the trade will demand in shoes three or six months from now. The shoe salesman drops in now every 60 days. The same with women’s hats, coats and dresses.

“Even men’s shoes are subject to ever changing styles. A man’s shoe that may be the rage today may be obsolete another season. And yet I well remember when the prestige of a store was gauged by the quality of the brogan shoes it sold.

“Remember those brogans? Made of thick cowhide; stiff cowhide uppers, devoid of linings; heavy cowhide soles, not sewed on but pegged with wooden pegs. Brass tips on the toes, iron rims imbedded in the heels. Guaranteed to wear a year in barnyard manure. That was the type of shoe rural people and the working people in town generally wore 30 or 40 years ago.

“Today we have no calls for brogans and, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know where to buy them.

“It seems to me that the old brogan shoe was a pretty good symbol of those days, when life was hard compared with what it is today. Forty years ago – certainly 50 years ago – there wasn’t a bathtub in the whole town, no piped water in any home.

“The telephone and the electric light had not arrived. Automobiles were unthinkable, and when they began to appear early in the century they were regarded as another rich man’s toy.

“Why, I remember the sensation caused by the first barrel of gasoline that was brought to town. George W. Twiddy, who ran a small grocery store, bought a peanut roaster to be heated by gasoline.

“He had to order his gasoline from Baltimore. When his barrel of gasoline arrived, he had it carted in from the steamboat wharf and placed back of his store.

“News of the arrival of that gasoline spread like wildfire. Gasoline was thought of as a highly inflammable, explosive and dangerous article. What was Mr. Twiddy thinking of, to bring a barrel of that deadly stuff to town and set it down right in the heart of the business section? Did he want to blow the whole town up?

“The town council was hurriedly called into special session. The mayor and councilmen, with white, tense faces took immediate action. An ordinance, effective pronto, was enacted prohibiting the storage of gasoline in greater than one-gallon quantities in the city limits.

“Twiddy was ordered to remove that barrel of gasoline to the outskirts of town, where he built a shelter over it and drew out a gallon at a time as needed for his peanut roaster….

“Imperceptibly at first, but rapidly enough, the automobile revolutionized all business. Sales became smaller and more frequent.

“The farmer who used to come to town once a month or once in three or six months with a list of supplies to last him until his next trip, now runs in any day in the week and buys a pair of shoes, a suit of overalls or a plow line and goes his way.

“The stools in front of the counters have gone away with the spittoons. Nobody has time to sit and shop anymore. Spitting is taboo….

“But the automobile has otherwise effected all business. It has increased the tempo and the cost of living. With the fixed charges of his automobile, higher rents, higher taxes and other advances of modern living, the masses seem to find it increasingly difficult to meet all of their obligations.

“Darn few people seem to be able to adjust their desire for things to their ability to pay for things.

“Again, the automobile has made the larger stores and bargain days of larger city stores available to the average man or woman who formerly had to buy at home or resort to a mail order catalog.

“Every day we see cars full of people passing us by to go to Norfolk or Richmond to buy. Often as not they could do as well at home, but they enjoy the excitement of travel and the contacts with the larger city life. But down the line, the smaller country merchant is seeing carloads of his old customers going by his door, heading for ours….

“”You hear a lot of bellyaching from little businessmen these days. You’re not getting a squawk out of me; I trim my sails to the winds as they blow, and when they don’t blow for a while I put out my oars.

“I once dreamed of getting a lot of money ahead and living on Easy Street. I don’t have any such dreams anymore; I just take life as I find it, live within my means, find my social divertissements in my church and Sunday school and with the old friends who stick by us year in and year out.

“You see, business isn’t just business with us as it is with the chain stores— it’s a pleasure….”

* * *

Betty Staton, Elizabeth City

A Federal Writers’ Project interviewer named Ruth L. Riddick talked with Betty Staton at her home in Elizabeth City, N.C., in the fall of 1938. Ms. Staton was a 48-year-old African American woman, mother of four. She made her living by taking in other people’s laundry. 

“Child, I have been bending this here back over washtubs and boiling pots since I was 16 or 17 years old. For the men folks that live by themselves, I charge them 50 cents if they were just hard working, but if they have good jobs I charge them a quarter more.

“I always try to figure out what they can pay according to what they can make.

“Then when I have a family’s washing, I charge $1.50 or $1.75 and if there is somebody in the family that work in grease I charge 10 cents more because that grease is mighty bad when you have to scrub and rub on it.

“I like to wash in the folks’ kitchens because then I don’t have to skimp around for wood to burn in the stove. But most folks don’t like you messing and boiling in their kitchens.

“I like to work in their kitchens because of the victuals you get to eat, too. When hard times were cramping my innards, breakfast and dinner were mighty tasty. I could save a little out and not eat it and then take home to my children.

“Hasn’t ever been no fuss about that except one time. That was a mighty penny pinching and choosey lady who was always telling me not to use too much soap powder in my washing and such as that.

“We had pork chops for dinner and I was washing dishes for her and… I saved the bones because all the meat wasn’t gnawed off of them. My children love to gnaw bones.

“Well I had a middling size bag full and she spied it. She grabbed it up and when she saw what was in it, she sure did look funny.”

Then Ms. Staton talked about how she kept her children warm during the hardest years of the Great Depression.

“It was a hard job to keep the children warm. But when I wasn’t washing, we always walked down the railroad and picked up the cinders that weren’t all burned up. Sometimes we found lumps of good coal and that burns mighty pretty when it’s mixed up with cinders.

“I (also) used to go to the backs of stores every morning early before they got to work and pick up the pieces of broken boxes that things were packed in, and they helped a lot to keep warm with.

“I wasn’t ashamed to go after they got there, but seems like when folks throw something away and then somebody comes along and picks it up, they think maybe they shouldn’t have thrown it away and then right away they want it back.

“I only have one meal a day, and that’s according to how lucky I am. Sometimes some of the neighbors that have gardens give me some greens, and I boil a pot of peas when I have them. We eat salt pork when we eat meat. I go to the fish markets and they always give me the fish they can’t sell.”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A few years ago, I carried a box of Charles Farrell’s old photographs of the state’s great herring fisheries back to one of the communities on the Chowan River where he took them. The photographs are poignant and beautiful, and the herring workers in them are unforgettable, but I also find them a little haunting because they remind me of all that can be lost.

Farrell took the photographs between 1937 and 1941. At the time, he was documenting fishing communities up and down the North Carolina coast. Today they are preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh.

When I carried the photographs to the Chowan River, I was trying to find anyone at all that might be able to identify some of the people in them or tell me what it had been like to work in those legendary herring fisheries.

Herring had been important on the Chowan River for thousands of years. The Chowanoke, an Algonquin-speaking tribe, had fished for herring on the river for ages, and before them other indigenous people.

When the British took the land, they fished for herring, too. They had started commercial fishing on the river in the mid-1700s. Enslaved laborers from Africa and their descendants did most of the fishing and the shore work.

From the late 1700s until nearly the end of the 20th century, the river was home to one of the largest commercial fisheries for river herring in the U.S. Some say it was the largest in the world for a great part of that time. Local fishermen once caught millions of tons of herring a year on the river.

In a five-year period, between 1878 and 1883, a single fishery on the Chowan River harvested 15 million herring.

Even a century later, the herring were still coming. I’ll never forget visiting one of my favorite historians, Alice Eley Jones, on the Chowan River back in the 1990s. After living in the Raleigh-Durham area for many years, she had returned to her hometown of Murfreesboro, on the upper part of the river. Alice and I drove all around the river and its creeks that day while she talked about the importance of herring in the area’s history.

“Fish literally clogged these streams,” Alice told me. She was talking about when she was a girl. “You could wade into Vaughan Creek and pick them up with your hand or a bucket. It’s not like it was one or two fish. It was millions of fish!”

She went on:

“Everybody went herring fishing. Some would have dip nets. Some would have bow nets. People would go down here, catch the fish, clean the fish and fry the fish right on the shore. Churches would go. It was a community event, a time of fellowship and community.”

That has changed. The herring fishery suffered a slow decline during much of the 20th century and it collapsed completely in the 1980s and ’90s — a victim of increasingly poor water quality, grave habitat loss and probably at least a measure of overfishing both on inland waters and out in the Atlantic.

In a desperate gambit, state regulators closed the herring fishery altogether in 2007.  For the first time in history, nobody could legally catch a herring on the Chowan River. The regulators hoped that the herring might come back on their own if they were not being harvested at all. The fishery is still closed on the Chowan River and throughout the state’s waters.

Charles Farrell’s photographs remind us of a different time though, and perhaps they also give us a vision of what could be again if the river is restored to health. When Farrell visited the Chowan, great shoals of herring still migrated out of the Atlantic at the end of every winter and swam up into the Albemarle Sound and its tributaries to spawn.

The fish companies sent fresh herring, salted herring and canned herring roe far and wide, but herring were also a staff of life for people who lived on the river.

In hard times I don’t know how they would have survived without them. Few winter pantries did not have a keg or two of salt herring in them, and some families ate herring and sometimes not much else for breakfast, lunch and supper.

Many of the oldest people I know in that part of the state recall making long trips to the Chowan River to purchase herring when they were young. Many families made the journey on Easter Monday, which was always a festive time at the herring beaches. Farmers brought carts, too. They often purchased “trash fish” and offal and carried them back home to use as fertilizer on their fields.

Some paid in cash. Others traded corn from their fields, a country ham or a mess of collard greens.

For fishermen and shore laborers alike, their work in the herring fishery was only seasonal. The fish’s spawning runs usually lasted about three months, roughly from mid-February into May. Most of the men returned to farms or timber mills or something like that for the rest of the year. Many of the women shore workers that we see in Farrell’s photographs probably returned to domestic work and/or worked in other people’s fields.

These photographs came from at least two sites on the Chowan River. One was the Perry-Belch herring company in Colerain, a small town on the west side of the river in Bertie County. Most local people today remember it as the Perry-Wynn Fish Co. The ownership and name changed in 1952.

The other site is a herring fishing beach called Cannons Ferry. That beach is located on the edge of a hamlet called Tyner, which is on the other side of the river in Chowan County.

In addition to the photographs from the Chowan River, I’m also including here photographs from three other herring fisheries that Farrell visited on that part of the North Carolina coast.  They include the Brickell fishery near Edenton, the Terrapin Point fishery at the mouth of the Cashie River and the Kitty Hawk and/or Slades fishery in Plymouth, on the Roanoke River. All five fisheries are located within 25 miles of one another.

* * *

One of the things I like most about Charles Farrell’s photographs is that he never forgot how important women and children were to the fishing industry. In all his travels, he paid attention to both the men and women in fishing communities, and also to the children.

For that reason, we often see sides of the commercial fishing industry in Farrell’s photographs that we rarely see in the work of other photographers at that time — or now. He didn’t just visit fishermen, and he didn’t just photograph fishermen with their boats and nets.

Instead, Farrell also directed his camera’s lens toward the women and children heading and gutting fish, canning roe, peeling shrimp, mending nets and shucking oysters. It’s very unusual for that time and for today, too.

I don’t know, but I have wondered how much this focus on women’s work reflected his wife Anne’s influence. They were very much partners in his efforts to document the state’s fishing communities, as in the rest of their lives.

Anne Farrell was very knowledgeable about photography. She was the co-proprietor of their photo supply shop in Greensboro, and she ran the shop on her own for many years after he grew ill in the 1940s. She didn’t always accompany him on his trips to the coast, but she often did.

As I looked through the Charles A. Farrell Collection at the State Archives, I could even tell that she was sometimes the photographer, not him, because he appears in some of the photographs. I couldn’t begin to guess how often she was behind the camera. However, I do assume that she at least occasionally took coastal photographs that are attributed to him. She may also have occasionally influenced her husband’s choice of subjects, though again I don’t really know.

As I look at Farrell’s photographs, I am also struck by the central role that African Americans played in the herring fishery. I won’t say any more about that here, but I think the photographs speak for themselves.

I am a little disappointed that I wasn’t more successful at finding people that could fill in more of the details about the scenes in these photographs. Over the last few years, I’ve been carrying Farrell’s photographs back to the fishing communities where he took them and sharing them with the families of the men and women in the photographs.

I’ve also shared them with many local commercial fishermen and other coastal people that have a knowledge of the kinds of fishing that we see in the photographs. Their insights have been especially helpful in interpreting what is happening in the photographs in a deeper way.

Overall I feel as if I have been fairly successful. I have learned a tremendous amount from many different people who were kind enough to share their time and knowledge with me.

You can see the results in my photo essays featuring Farrell’s work in those other fishing communities. So far I’ve published pieces on the photographs that he took in Colington, Southport and at two sites in Onslow County, a mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island and a village on the New River that was later destroyed to make way for the construction of Camp Lejeune.

Time has been passing though, and as we all know, time can be very unforgiving when we’re trying to hold onto the voices of the past. So far I have utterly failed at finding the people that might tell me more about these photographs of herring fisheries on the Chowan and elsewhere in northeastern North Carolina. I haven’t given up hope though. Perhaps someone will read this and say something like,” Well gracious, he should talk to my great-aunt Daphne!”

I will be waiting for that call.

* * *

Cannons Ferry seems a bit like a ghost town now. A few years ago, I drove down to that side of the Chowan River to see if I could find anybody that might be able to identify some of the people in Farrell’s photographs. I found a nice little boardwalk with signs that discuss the herring fishery’s history, and there’s a beautiful view of the river. But mostly I remember empty homes, old wharf pilings and a few abandoned cinderblock buildings.

I was hoping that I might even find some of the people that used to work at Cannons Ferry in the 1930s still alive or at least find their children or grandchildren that could tell me about them.

If I did, I hoped that they might be willing to sit a spell and tell me what it was like.

While I was down there, I did meet a group of local fishermen that had just come off the river. (They weren’t herring fishing.) We spread out copies of Farrell’s Chowan River photographs on one of their pickup trucks and looked at them together, which I think we all enjoyed.

They had things to tell me about herring fishing for sure, but every time they thought they might recognize one of the people in a photograph, they’d hesitate and say something like, “Well, they’ve been dead a long time now,” or “Their family moved away a long time ago.”

Cannons Ferry is a beautiful place, though so many of its old homes seem to have been abandoned and all that’s left of the fishery are those old pilings and the remains of old fish sheds. The river’s dark waters are broad there, the shores lined as far as you can see by cypress trees, and you can’t help but feel that you’re on the edge of something great and mysterious and wild.

I was there at dusk and when I looked out on the river, I saw hardly a light. I saw only mile after mile of the cypress glades that mark the edge of the great swamplands that reach north up into the Great Dismal.

Before getting in my car and heading home, I walked up the road a little toward those swamps, passing maybe a half-dozen old fish camps. I could hear a whippoorwill singing not too far off, and I thought about the people in these photographs, and how interesting and how beautiful they all look. As I walked along the shore, I thought I could almost hear their heartbeats.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A friend in New Bern recently sent me an issue of the Raleigh News & Observer that he found in his family’s old papers. The newspaper’s date was Nov. 5, 1898. A front-page article was about a large white supremacy meeting at the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern.

That was only a few days before the massacre of Black citizens in Wilmington that was in the news so much a few months ago.

Wilmington, the state’s largest city at that time, was 90 miles from New Bern. However, as I read the issue of the News & Observer that my friend sent me, I couldn’t help but feel that what happened in Wilmington could easily have happened in New Bern, too.

The white supremacy plum

On that 5^th day of November 1898, the News & Observer featured a large drawing of a plum on the top of its front page. The artist had labeled the fruit “White Supremacy Plum.”

Above the drawing was a headline: “A Fruit We All Like.”  Below the drawing was another headline: “We Will Pluck It on the 8^th.”

The 8^th of November 1898 was the date of the fall elections. At the time, the News & Observer was playing a central role in a white supremacy movement that reached across North Carolina.

The story from New Bern appeared under the drawing of the “White Supremacy Plum.” Its headline read:

PATIENCE CEASES:

RINGING RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED BY WHITE MEN

A summary of the story’s content appeared in several smaller headlines beneath those words.

The first several headlines read:

WHITES WHO VOTE WITH THE NEGROES DENOUNCED

AS TRAITORS TO RACE AND COUNTRY

The next three headlines read:

WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM;

WHITE LABOR TO BE EMPLOYED INSTEAD OF COLORED;

STRONG SPEECHES BY SHAW, BRYAN AND OTHERS

The story began below those words. According to the newspaper’s correspondent, a mass meeting of “the white men of Newbern (sic)” had been held at the Craven County Courthouse. At that meeting, many of the town’s wealthiest and most influential white citizens had gathered to make a statement on white supremacy.

The chairman of the meeting was Alfred Decator “A.D.” Ward, a prominent local attorney. He was originally from Duplin County, where he had been mayor of Kenansville and where he had been elected to the N.C. House of Representatives.

Probably the most prominent of the city leaders at the meeting was James A. Bryan. At the time, Bryan was the president of both the National Bank of New Bern and the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad Co.

He was also one of the largest landowners in the state of North Carolina. His holdings included, but were not limited to, more than 57,000 acres in what is now the Croatan National Forest.

Bryan owned and resided in what is now known as the John Wright Stanly House, which is one of the historic sites at Tryon Palace. Educated at Princeton, he chaired the county board of commissioners for two decades and served a term each as mayor of New Bern and state senator.

According to the story in the News & Observer, both James A. Bryan and A.D. Ward were among the local leaders that gave “enthusiastic and patriotic speeches” during the white supremacy meeting.

‘Deliverance from Negro Domination’

At the Craven County Courthouse, the white leaders passed five resolutions that were very similar to ones that the white supremacists in Wilmington passed that same week, just prior to the massacre and coup d’etat there.

In the first resolution, they resolved that:

“It is the duty of every white person, male and female, to do everything in their power to achieve an honorable deliverance from negro domination and its accompanying ruin and disgrace.”

At that time, African Americans made up approximately 65% of New Bern’s population. In any free and fair election, Black citizens would inevitably have held a significant number of offices.

The town’s African Americans did hold some elective offices, but relatively few. Black citizens held three of the 11 positions on New Bern’s board of alderman, for instance. That was a large number compared to many other North Carolina towns, but far from what one could reasonably call “negro domination.”

In this first resolution, the white supremacists were announcing that they would no longer tolerate even that degree of Black participation in politics in New Bern or the rest of Craven County.

Traitors to their race and country

The meeting’s second resolution read:

“That it is the sense of this meeting that from henceforth all white men who vote and ally themselves in politics with the negro shall be denounced and regarded as traitors to their race and country and as public enemies, and not to be associated with.”

A duly elected political coalition of Republicans, largely Black, and Populists, largely white, had governed North Carolina since 1894. In this resolution, the city’s white supremacists were threatening their white neighbors who persisted in supporting that coalition of Black and white voters.

The language of the resolution is noteworthy. In many parts of the world, and at many different times, extremist political movements have begun to refer to their political opponents as “public enemies” and “traitors to their race and country.” It is never a good sign, and of course it is often a prelude to great violence and widespread persecution.

The white supremacists in Wilmington also used that kind of language just before the shooting started.

Traitors to the white race

The meeting’s third resolution read:

“That we denounce such traitors to the white race as make a business of organizing the negro, and we hereby warn [them] to desist from their efforts to further ruin and humiliate the white people ere the day of forbearance shall pass and the time shall come when an outraged people shall realize that such creatures are nothing more than beasts of prey to be driven away.”

In this resolution, New Bern’s white supremacists continued to use language that demonized their opponents. In this case, they were threatening local white leaders of the Republican Party.

Calling them “beasts of prey” also sounds very much like Wilmington just before the shooting started.

Brave and honorable men

The meeting’s fourth resolution read:

“That while our brothers of the white race in other communities are bravely daring all danger to rid themselves and us of the dark cloud of negro domination, it behooves us to encourage them with the assurance that we, too, have resolved to use every means that brave and honorable men may for the deliverance and salvation of our State from the horrible fate which threatens.”

In this resolution, the white supremacists in New Bern were making clear that they knew what was about to happen in Wilmington and they supported it.

That they knew what was going to happen in Wilmington was not surprising. By the 5^th of November, it was widely known that white supremacists were planning to take control of Wilmington three days later, even if they had to resort to violence in the streets, massive electoral fraud and military rule.

Newspaper reporters from as far away as Chicago were already on their way to Wilmington because they had gotten wind of the coming storm.

In this resolution, New Bern’s white supremacy leaders signaled that they knew what was coming in Wilmington, too. They also seem to be saying that they would take similar steps in New Bern if necessary.

Preference to white people

The white supremacists in New Bern intended the fifth and final resolution to encourage New Bern’s poor and working-class white men to support their efforts. The resolution read:

“That we, the employers of labor, will give preference to white people in all cases wherever practicable.”

In this resolution, the town’s leading businessmen were promising white workers that they would hire them in their shops and factories over Black workers, even if the Black workers were more qualified and had more experience, if the white workers supported the “white supremacy ticket.”

They were, in effect, cutting a deal: side with us, and not your Black fellow workers, and we will look out for you.

The same thing happened in Wilmington.

The business leaders in both cities proved true to their word. In the coming years, that kind of racial discrimination in employment became universal, and as much a part of Jim Crow as separate drinking fountains and segregated lunch counters.

A different kind of coup d’etat

The Nov. 8 election was said to have passed peacefully in New Bern, though we know very little about what might have happened there and gone unsaid.

We do know though that the white supremacists prevailed. There was a bright spot or two for the town’s Black citizens: Isaac H. Smith, a prominent local Black businessman, for instance, won a seat to the NC House.

But he was the exception. The white men at the meeting that the News & Observer described on Nov. 5, 1898, became the town’s mayors, aldermen, county commissioners, school board members, state legislators and U.S. congressmen for the next generation.

We also know that, in the weeks after the election, the white supremacists did not wait for the town officials that had not been up for reelection in 1898 to serve out their terms before they moved to replace them. They instead convinced the state legislature to dissolve the city’s charter and throw all of their political opponents, both Black and white, out of office.

For at least a few weeks, the city of New Bern does not seem to have actually existed, legally speaking. When a new charter was created and new elections held early in 1899, white supremacists held every office in the city.

For more on that chapter in the city’s history, see Dr. Thomas Hanchett and Ms. Ruth Little’s excellent 1994 report on the history of two of New Bern’s African American neighborhoods, Long Wharf and Duffyfield.

In that way, the white supremacists in New Bern accomplished their own kind a coup d’etat, much like what happened in Wilmington. Their coup was bloodless as far as we know, but just as effective.

It could have been even worse. Judging from the Nov. 5, 1898, issue of the News & Observer that my friend shared with me, I find it hard not to think that, if things had gone just a little differently, and if a spark had been lit, we might well be talking about bodies in the streets of New Bern, too.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A retired state trooper named Bobbie “Bob” Edwards sent me a message a few weeks ago. He told me that he had read my recent story about the bombing of an African American church in eastern North Carolina in 1966. He said my article had brought back memories. He had seen the church explode, he told me. He had been the only eyewitness.

Mr. Edwards had been stationed in Craven County, North Carolina, between 1965 and 1971. On the night of the church bombing, he was in his third year of what would be a 32-year career in the State Highway Patrol. Now 81 years old, he has retired to Yadkin County, North Carolina.

Mr. Edwards and I exchanged a few messages and then we arranged to talk on the phone a couple days later. When we did talk, the first thing that struck me about him was the way his voice sounded like the people I grew up with. I could tell that he was from eastern North Carolina.

The second thing that struck me about him was something else about his voice. I know you can’t always judge a person by their voice, but what I heard was a special kind of decency and kindness.

* * *

I only learned the real story of the church bombing a few months ago, when an African American gentleman named Chris Johnson got in touch with me. Mr. Johnson is a retired army first sergeant who lives in Texas now. His family belonged to the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church at the time of the bombing. His memories revealed the story of the church bombing for the first time and formed the foundation for my article, “The Bombing of the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church.”

Unknown persons — almost assuredly Ku Klux Klansmen — bombed the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church in Ernul, North Carolina, on April 9, 1966. Trooper Edwards was only 24 years old at the time. He is white, like all state troopers were at that time. He had grown up on a tobacco farm in a little crossroads called Contentnea, just outside the town of Kinston, 30 miles to the west of Ernul. He had been raised, he said, “in a Christian home.”

He had been on patrol that spring night. It was about 11:30 in the evening, and he was driving slowly down the Old Brick Road, which local people also call the “Nine Foot Road.”

The road dates to the 1700s and is part of what many years ago was called the King’s Highway or the Post Road. The road ran all the way from Boston to Charleston. There are not many places where you can still drive on the old bricks, but Ernul is one of them.

An old legend says an enslaved man with no legs built the section of the road that passes through Ernul. They say that the man worked on a low platform that had wheels, and he built the road with bricks that were used as ballast stones on ships that came up the Neuse River.

The Old Brick Road in Ernul is still only 9 feet wide and when two cars meet, one has to pull onto the shoulder.

Edwards told me that night was very dark. Ernul was just a tiny little place. It didn’t have any street lights and the only businesses were a country store and a roadside inn out on U.S. 17, a two-lane road. The Cool Springs FWB Church was set back in the woods anyway, he told me, so he was used to it being dark and quiet that time of night.

He told me that the explosion shook his patrol car like an earthquake. At first, he thought that somebody was shooting at him. He slammed on his brakes, rolled onto the ground next to his patrol car with his revolver drawn and prepared to defend himself.

That was when he saw what had happened. “The whole front of the church was blown out,” he remembered. There were splintered boards and broken pews and Bibles and hymnals scattered everywhere. He knew instantly that the Ku Klux Klan had done it.

He looked closer and found no fire and nobody had been in the church at that hour. He returned to his patrol car and radioed headquarters. Sheriff deputies and FBI agents soon showed up, and they told him that they would handle the crime scene and he could go back on patrol.

* * *

Edwards remembered that the church bombing occurred in the early days of school desegregation in that part of Craven County. Racial tensions were high, and there had been a good deal of Ku Klux Klan violence.

A few days after the church bombing, the principal at the Farm Life School in Vanceboro, a small town 10 miles north of Ernul, reported that the school had received a bomb threat. Students and teachers were evacuated and sent home. No bomb was found.

Two days later, unidentified white men threw stones at Black children trying to get on a school bus. Another morning a carload of white men tried to force a school bus to the side of the road. They targeted the bus because some of the schoolchildren were Black. White children and Black children had never gone to the same schools in that part of Craven County, so they had never previously ridden the school bus together.

The bus driver managed to get away from the white men. Instead of continuing his route, he returned to the school without picking up the children on the rest of his route. The principal called the State Highway Patrol and Edwards was one of the troopers that answered the call.

When the bus driver returned to his route, Edwards followed the bus in his patrol car. On subsequent days, he rode on a school bus carrying a riot shotgun. For the next two weeks, he and other state troopers rode on every local school bus. Patrol cars followed the buses as well.

* * *

Edwards recalled that the Ku Klux Klan held a rally and a parade in Vanceboro two weeks later. He remembers Klansmen being on one side of the town’s main street and outraged Black citizens standing on the other side of the street.

At the end of the rally, gunfire broke out. Edwards was on duty there, but he could not tell whether the Klan or the Black citizens fired first. He did know that for a time there was a good deal of shooting. The state troopers and the local police eventually restored the peace. They didn’t arrest anyone, but they did confiscate rifles and other weapons.

Edwards told me that other state troopers confided to him that some of the local sheriffs and their deputies sympathized with the Klan. He had also heard that at least some of them were KKK members. He said that he did not know for sure if that was true though.

I asked Edwards about his own racial views in the 1960s and now. I also asked him about his outlook on the civil rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan when he was stationed in Craven County.

He told me that he often felt caught in the middle during those years. The Klan detested state troopers, he said, and most Black people looked at the troopers with deep suspicion and often as enemies of the African American community. (The State Highway Patrol, by the way, only began accepting Black recruits in 1969.)

“I just tried to do my job and be fair to everybody,” Edwards told me. He said that he had been raised a Christian. “You’re supposed to love your fellow man and I tried to do that,” he told me.

I told him that I had heard those words from many other white Christians, including men that had been Klansmen in the 1960s. I told him that I was inclined to be skeptical. But I have to admit: there was something about the way that Edwards said those words that made me believe him.

* * *

Edwards remembered the man that was head of the Ku Klux Klan in that section of Craven County in the 1960s. His name was Raymond Mills, and he and two other white men had been charged with setting off a series of bombs in New Bern in 1965. New Bern is 15 miles south of Ernul and is the seat of Craven County.

The bombs targeted a civil right meeting at an African American church and a mortuary owned by a local NAACP activist. Mills and the other two men originally faced federal and state charges. However, federal authorities withdrew their charges, and the men pled guilty to reduced state charges and were given only probationary sentences.

“The Klan, seemed like every time they got charged with something, they’d get out of it,” Edwards recalled.

Many local people were convinced that Mills was also behind the bombing of the Cool Springs FWB Church. Nobody was ever charged with the crime, however.

Edwards told me that he had met Mills two or three times. While on patrol, he had stopped him for traffic violations. He said that Mills was much like the other Klan leaders whose speeches he had heard when he was on duty at the public rallies that the KKK held in local farm fields.

“A cantankerous sort,” he said. “Disliked the government.” During the traffic stops, Mills did not want to show him his driver license and did not think that a member of the State Highway Patrol had a right to require him to show it. “He was that kind of fellow,” Edwards told me.

Later that year, a Klansman shot a state trooper not far from Ernul, on the road between New Bern and Bayboro. That happened during a traffic stop.

* * *

Edwards told me that he did not know the minister at the Cool Springs FWB Church, but he did get to know the Black minister at one of its sister churches, St. Joseph’s Free Will Baptist Church. They first met when he stopped the minister because he had a light out on a logging truck that he operated when he wasn’t in the pulpit or otherwise serving his parishioners.

Located 13 or 14 miles north of Ernul, on the other side of Vanceboro, “St. Joe’s” was the site of at least one large civil rights meeting around the time of the church bombing in Ernul. Unknown persons, believed to be Klansmen, had bombed St. Joe’s five months before the bombing at the Cool Springs FWB Church.

Edwards told me about the traffic stop. When he examined the minister’s vehicle registration card, he had noticed that it was due to expire that day. He had told the minister that was the case.

The minister told him that he was aware of the registration’s expiration date, but times had been hard and he did not have the money to renew it. He explained that was why he was taking the load of logs to the mill that day. If he got a good price for them, he’d be able to renew his registration.

Edwards suggested that they pray over the matter. That may seem a little unusual in some places, but it’s the kind of thing that’s not hard to imagine at all where I grew up.

“Maybe we should just pray that you get enough money for that license tag,” he told me he told the preacher.

Sitting in the patrol car on the side of the road, the two men closed their eyes and prayed. They prayed that God might bless them both, but that God might most particularly bless the reverend and help him to get a good price for his logs so that he could renew his registration.

According to Edwards, their prayers were answered. The Reverend did get enough money from the sale of his logs to renew his registration. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Trooper Edwards later introduced the minister at St. Joe’s to the minister at his church.

Edwards told me that he and the two preachers sometimes got together in the weeks after that traffic stop. They’d sit on his minister’s front porch. The two clergymen would talk about the Bible and discuss theology, while the young state trooper mostly sat quietly and listened.

“Start with the church bombing, but bring it ‘round to loving your neighbor,” Edwards suggested to me, when I asked him if he minded if I wrote a little something about his memories of the night that the Cool Springs FWB Church was bombed.

I told him that I would do my best. I was going to tell him something else, too, but I decided that there was no need: he already seemed to know that history isn’t just about the things that we have seen in the past, but also about what we have in our hearts.

-End-

Note from the author: This is the first chapter of Shark Hunter: Russell J. Coles at Cape Lookout. The rest of the story will be posted on davidcecelski.com in its entirety over the next few weeks.

A few years ago, a gentleman in Virginia, Walter Coles Sr., invited my daughter and me to visit his family’s archive of research materials related to his uncle, a world-renowned shark hunter named Russell J. Coles who did the bulk of his shark hunting at Cape Lookout between 1900 and 1925.

The invitation was extremely generous. Russell Jordan Coles was a fascinating figure. Every summer for that quarter century, he left his tobacco brokerage in Danville, Virginia, and moved onto a houseboat in the quiet waters of Cape Lookout’s bight.

While there, he grew obsessed with sharks. At first he pursued them with rod and reel. Later, he hunted them with lances and harpoons, and eventually he even employed heavy nets and trot lines. Over the years, he hunted and killed hundreds and possibly thousands of great whites, hammerheads, tiger, thresher, nurse and other sharks at and near Cape Lookout.

Of course one can look at that kind of slaughter as a multitude of acts of great courage and feats of death-defying daring or as acts of brutal carnage and ecological ruin. It might have been both.

Coles was not only a big game fisherman though. He had studied a little medicine before he left — or was asked to leave — the Virginia Military Institute after a prank in which he tried to blow up the school’s arsenal with an extraordinarily large quantity of dynamite. He never finished his degree and he had no training in ichthyology, or the scientific study of fish, at all.

Yet sharks and rays fascinated him and he probably observed them in their natural habitat as much or more than any other man on Earth.

He came to Cape Lookout seeking to test his manhood and collect trophies. But the sharks and rays got under his skin and he soon began to study their habits in the wild. After building a laboratory on his houseboat, he even began dissecting his fallen prey and studying its anatomy and physiology.

At that time, the scientific study of sharks and rays was still in its infancy. Very few biologists had studied sharks in the wild, the first scientific study of shark behavior was yet to be written and many leading shark experts knew them only as preserved specimens.

By virtue of his field experience, Coles was uniquely well placed to make a pioneering contribution to the field.

By 1910, several of the most knowledgeable shark experts at museums and universities in both the U.S. and Europe were corresponding with him and he had become one of the country’s leading authorities on sharks and rays.

He developed an especially strong relationship with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To this day, marine scientists on both sides of the Atlantic use specimens that he collected at Cape Lookout in their research.

Marine biologists also continue to use his scientific writings, and even marine biology students learn about at least one aspect of his research — his pioneering observations on the cooperative hunting behavior of sharks.

At Coles Hill

My daughter, Vera Cecelski, who is also a historian, and I accepted the invitation of Russell Coles’ nephew Walter Coles Sr. and his wife Alice with great gratitude. To our knowledge, no other scholars had previously been granted access to the family’s archive.

In the winter and spring of 2014, we made two trips to Coles Hill, the family’s ancestral estate in Chatham, Virginia.

Today, Coles Hill is a beautiful place with quiet country roads and hundreds of acres of broad pastureland, fields and orchards.

The family has been at the center of a controversial proposal to build a uranium mining and milling facility at Coles Hill, however. You can get a taste of that controversy in articles in The Washington Post here and in Bloomberg News here.

Chatham is a small town in the south-central part of the state, in the lovely rolling hill country between Danville and Lynchburg.

The library occupies a room in the Coles’ home, a Georgian brick manor built circa 1817 just outside of Chatham.

The family’s roots run deep into America’s history. George Washington stayed with Russell Coles’ grandfather on his southern tour in 1791. James Madison signed that grandfather’s commission in the army, and Thomas Jefferson signed the family’s land grant.

The house is built of Flemish bond brick made at Coles Hill, presumably by enslaved laborers, and on one side of the mansion are gardens that lead down to the family’s burial ground.

Inside, Vera and I marveled at the family’s treasures, including one of the hand-forged harpoons that Russell Coles used to hunt sharks and giant manta rays and a breathtaking collection of antebellum furniture built by the great African American furniture maker Thomas Day of Milton.

After visiting with the Coles and hearing several family stories about Walter Coles Sr.’s Uncle Russell, we settled into the archival materials from their library.

The Teddy Roosevelt Letters

As Vera and I plunged into the family’s library, we quickly discovered that the collection of materials on Russell Coles is matchless. It includes his journals and diaries, reams of private correspondence, unpublished writings, many photographs and an assortment of field notes on his observations of sharks, rays and other marine fishes at Cape Lookout.

It also includes copies of the articles that Coles published in natural history journals and magazines, some of which are now quite hard to find, as well as albums of newspaper clippings about him.

Russell Coles was also a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s. I imagine many scholars would consider the letters between Coles and Roosevelt to be the collection’s highlight.

In those letters, Roosevelt and Coles discussed their plans for a giant manta ray hunting expedition in Florida, their dream of fighting in World War I with a battalion of old codgers like themselves and much else.

Even when I wasn’t reading their letters, I often thought of Teddy as I browsed Coles’ papers.  The two men’s physical resemblance, for one thing, is striking, though I noticed that his contemporaries more often compared Coles’ appearance to that of President Taft.

But more relevantly, the great themes in Roosevelt and Coles’ lives often seem to have been one and the same.

Both had an unquenchable thirst for adventure and exploration and an avid curiosity about the natural world.

Both possessed indomitable wills and unyielding, often reckless desires to hunt and conquer, and not just sharks and other wild animals. Both had tremendous appetites for life that could not be satisfied.

Both men also felt a never-ending restlessness. They had urgent, boundless needs to know what was most primeval in their own hearts and, I think some would say, to steel themselves against the things they feared most.

They spoke the language of colonizers and imperialists: to explore, conquer and hold dominion.

No matter how frail they grew in old age, even when Roosevelt neared his end and could barely get out of bed, the two men still shared a dream of taking up arms and going to Cape Lookout to fight monsters in the sea.

A Man with a Harpoon

When Vera and I said goodbye to our extraordinarily kind hosts and left Coles Hill for the last time, our heads were full of a hundred images.

Now, several years later, one of those images stands out most to me: Coles, the aging hunter, rising on his houseboat in the early morning light, as he did again and again, and taking a whaleboat into the breakers several miles out along the great shoal south of the island’s lighthouse.

Large numbers of sharks congregated along that shoal. Coles would stand in the whaleboat’s prow with his harpoon, made by his own hands in his own forge, and go after them until he was exhausted and the sea blood red.

He would do this for an hour or two, and then he would come back to the houseboat and have his breakfast.

At Coles Hill, Vera and I learned about a great many other parts of his life, but when I think of Coles, I picture him on that shoal: the lone boat, the dark red waves, the great sharks and a man, far from young, wielding a harpoon, striking left and right, left and right, as if nothing else in the world could make a man feel more alive.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

David Cecelski kicks off his series, “The Story of Shad Boats” with this introduction. 

Today (April 27) I’m excited to start a special series called “The Story of Shad Boats.” Over a dozen posts, I’ll be exploring the origins, construction and history of those legendary traditional workboats that graced the waters of the North Carolina coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Throughout this series, my guide will be a remarkable body of oral history interviews, naval architects’ drawings, historical photographs and archival documents shared with me by the country’s leading authorities on shad boats and their history, Earl Willis Jr. and Mike Alford.

Over the last 40 years, Earl and Mike have documented the history of shad boats with a rigor, dedication and passion that I find exemplary and inspiring.

To my way of thinking, their work on shad boats has been one of the most important research projects on North Carolina’s maritime past in my lifetime.

So I want to start this special series by talking a little bit about Mike and Earl and their remarkable odyssey to document the story of the shad boat — the boat that, largely due to their efforts, the North Carolina General Assembly made the official “state boat” in 1987.

On Roanoke Island’s Shores

Now a retired high school teacher, Earl is a son of Wanchese, a village on the southern end of Roanoke Island, between the mainland of Dare County and the Outer Banks.

In the late 1870s, the first shad boat was built on Roanoke Island. For the next half century, the island remained the place where shad boats were most often built and used.

As we’ll see in more detail in the fifth part of this series, the large majority of boatyards that turned out shad boats were located either on Roanoke Island or within 20 miles of its shores.

When Earl was growing up in Wanchese, the age of the shad boat was long over. Yet his neighbors and relatives still talked about the shad boats of their youths with a kind of reverence that captivated him and made him want to know more about them.

Beginning in the 1970s, while he was still teaching, Earl began documenting the history of those unique workboats and their builders. He collected stories, visited with old shad boatbuilders, studied surviving shad boats and gathered many different kinds of documents that cast light on their history.

I find Earl’s interviews with the last surviving shad boat builders especially priceless. When he did his first interviews, the oldest people he visited could still recall boats and builders from the 1880s and ’90s.

That generation has passed now and we would have very few firsthand recollections of the shad boat’s heyday if it weren’t for Earl’s interviews, which he mostly did on his own but sometimes in the company of Mike, too.

Earl and Uncle Joe

I can’t say enough about the importance of Earl Willis Jr.’s interviews with the last generation of shad boat builders and others who remembered those builders and their boats.

Between 1976 and 1986, Earl interviewed a total of 30 different builders, their family members and other people with firsthand knowledge of the shad boat’s history.

They included Moses Basnight, Capt. Wayland Baum, Ethel Midyette Carawan, H. A. Creef, Arnold Daniels, George Daniels, Edward Davis, Evelyn Davis, Newton Davis, Vernon Davis, Worden Dough, Wynne Dough, Floyd M. Gard, Vernon Gaskill, Max Guthrie, John Herbert, Joe Meekins, Ralph Meekins, P.D. Midgett, Gus Montague, Willie Rogers, Ira Spencer, Elijah Tate, Earl Tillett, Leland Tillett, Marshall Tillett, Sallye Baum Tillett, Hal Ward, Florine Tillett Williams and Edmond Wright.

Earl visited some of those individuals repeatedly. As his own knowledge of shad boats deepened, he returned to them repeatedly to ask more detailed and complex questions.

For instance, according to research notes that he and Mike shared with me, Earl talked 11 times with former shad boatbuilder Worden Dough on Roanoke Island.

He discussed shad boats with another veteran builder, Vernon Gaskill, on nine different occasions.

Earl’s uncle, Joe Meekins, was his most devoted informant. Born in Wanchese in 1892, Mr. Meekins started building boats with his father at the Wanchese Boat Shop and Railways in 1908. He worked on boats and built boats and ships for much of his life, even purchasing and restoring a shad boat when he was already 88 years old.

According to Earl’s notes, he and his uncle discussed the fine points of shad boat design and construction at least 22 times between 1981 and 1986.

Earl’s notes from those conversations alone would make for a remarkable textbook on shad boats and their history.

Mr. Meekins passed away in 1997, at the age of 105.

From State Ferries to Wooden Boats

Mike Alford is another lifelong small-boat enthusiast. Originally from the Low Country of South Carolina, Mike was trained as a nautical architect.

While working at the State of North Carolina’s ferry division, he designed the Governor Hyde, the largest state ferry at that time and one that I took many a time between Ocracoke Island and Cedar Island.

Mike later became the first curator of traditional watercraft at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, North Carolina. Among his many other accomplishments there, he co-founded the museum’s Wooden Boat Show, now in its 45^th year.

As soon as Mike came to the museum in 1975, he began the first comprehensive survey of the state’s traditional workboat types and their history.

He visited old boatbuilders and learned from them. He studied historical accounts and visited museum collections.

He also analyzed the relics of historically significant boats that he and others found throughout the North Carolina coast.

Earl and Mike discovered their mutual passion for shad boats in 1981. If I may borrow a line from “Casablanca,” it was “the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

At that time, they began a remarkable collaboration that continues to this day, when both men are a tiny bit less spry than they were when they first began their shad boat research.

Throughout this series, my posts will draw from Mike and Earl’s published works, research notes, boat drawings, photograph files and other collections which they graciously shared with me.

I’ll also use the notes that I took when I joined the two of them on a trip to Roanoke Island several years ago.

A Door into Another Time and Place

I will present this series in the following 12 parts:

1. Introduction
2. Looking the Wind Square in the Eye
3. What the Keel Tells Us
4. A Grand Old Soul
5.  Shad Boat Country
6. Earl Willis, Jr.’s Sketch of a Shad Boat
7. Root Knees & Juniper Swamps
8. Planking Up
9. Spritsails & Goose Wings
10. Proggin’
11. Capt. Nal Midyette: The Shad Boat Builder of Engelhard
12. The Last Shad Boats

At the end of the series, I will also examine the boat’s transition from sail to gasoline engines, its final days and its legacy in our maritime history.

So let’s begin. In my next post,  I’ll move forward with a general overview of shad boats—what exactly is a shad boat? What was distinctive about them? And why are they still held in such high esteem?

In a way, the question is this: what is it about a small wooden boat that was only built in one tiny corner of the North Atlantic for barely half a century that continues to capture our imaginations?

Even in a 12-part series, I cannot tell the shad boat’s whole story.

But over the next couple weeks, I hope that I can at least convey a good general sense of what Earl and Mike have accomplished and what I have learned from them about these extraordinary watercraft.

By looking at shad boats closely and from many different angles, I hope we might also discover in them something of a portal into another time and place– a door, so to speak, into the largely forgotten coastal world in which the shad boat was created, built and used.

Read more

• The entire shad boat series is at davidcecelski.com

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Today I am remembering a very special day just a couple months ago, before the quarantines and before the shuttered stores and empty streets, when Marion Evans and I explored a corner of the North Carolina coast that was completely new to me and seemed like an almost magical place.

Marion was my guide. She is a very talented local historian dedicated to discovering and preserving the story of the community where she grew up.

The community is called Piney Grove and it is is now part of Bolivia, a small town 15 miles from Southport, in Brunswick County.

Marion has been doing some extraordinary research on her great-great-grandfather and the founding of Piney Grove.

She and I had been talking on the telephone for some time about the community’s history, but I had never met her before or been to Piney Grove.

So when I was invited to give a lecture in Southport, I immediately called her up and asked if she might be willing to give me a tour of her part of Brunswick County while I was in the area.

She graciously agreed and we spent a lovely day together. I felt deeply privileged to learn about a part of the North Carolina coast that most people know only from quick glimpses as they speed down U.S. 17 on their way to Sunset Beach, Ocean Isle and Brunswick County’s other beach communities.

‘Old, Old, Old School’

Marion and I met in front of the county courthouse in Bolivia, which I find a strange and intriguing name for a town of 143 citizens built on a little rise of land between Half Hell Swamp and what is left of the Green Swamp, up in the headwaters of Lockwood’s Folly River.

Why Bolivia’s founders named the town after either the country in South America or the revolutionary for which it was named — Simón Bolívar, El Libertador — is a mystery.

Despite its small size, Bolivia is the county seat of Brunswick County, which is the coastal county that runs from the Cape Fear River, just below Wilmington, to the South Carolina border.

At the courthouse I jumped into Marion’s car and we immediately headed off to explore the countryside. Along the way, she regaled me with stories about Piney Grove, the old African American settlement where she grew up on the edge of Bolivia, down along Pinch Gut Creek.

Though still young in age and even younger at heart, Marion is already the caretaker of the community’s history and the keeper of its stories.

In a way she inherited that role from her grandmother, Goldie Evans. Much like Marion, she was the kind of woman that listened to the old people’s stories and remembered them.

Marion told me that her grandmother had 16 children, buried four, lived to be a 101 years old and never seemed to forget anything. She described her grandmother as “old, old, old school.”

I think I would have liked to know her. Marion said that she was a sweet, kind, funny and generous-hearted woman. She was also a local legend for always carrying a pistol in her purse and a rifle strapped over her shoulder.

Abraham Galloway’s Father and Mother

Marion began her tour of Piney Grove’s history on Galloway Road, which excited me because it led through the neighborhood that may well have been the childhood home of the father and mother of the young slave rebel Abraham Galloway, the hero of my book, “The Fire of Freedom.”

Abraham Galloway’s father had been a white ship’s pilot in Southport (not his owner), but he had been raised on a plantation on or close to what is now Galloway Road.

Abraham’s mother, Hester Hankins, was an enslaved African American woman. She too was likely born and raised in the vicinity of Galloway Road.

At a place I am sure I would not remember now, Marion turned off the road and drove up into a quiet glade where she showed me a large cemetery full of Galloways and Hankinses.

We got out of the car and walked among the headstones, under the bluest sky ever.

I imagined that somewhere near there, perhaps by unmarked graves along the tree line where slaves used to be buried, young Abraham Galloway had come and visited loved ones he had lost.

Piney Grove

As Marion and I drove up Galloway Road, we passed old farms, broad pastures and deep woods. Only once or twice did we see another vehicle on the road.

She told me that the road had always seemed like a special and enchanting place to her.

Everywhere we went, she pointed out interesting things: Piney Grove’s old farms, a pair of liquor stills in the woods, an unmarked graveyard — probably a slave cemetery — and the original site of the first St. John Baptist Church, which was built on Marion’s great-great-grandfather’s land, among many other sites.

The Seven Sisters

As we explored that far side of Bolivia, Marion also told me about the Seven Sisters. They were the Wilson family’s daughters, and she talked about them as if they still walked the Earth.

Almost 150 years ago, the Seven Sisters and their husbands and children founded Piney Grove. That was just after the Civil War, when that land was deep woods and turpentine camps.

Marion’s great-great-grandfather, Caesar Evans, married one of the Wilson sisters.

Marion told me that a series of almost miraculous events had to happen to bring Caesar and her great-great-grandmother Annie together and, later, for Annie and Caesar to end up in Piney Grove.

First, Caesar managed to escape from the Evans family during the Civil War. The Evans family was from Greenville, in Pitt County, but it is not clear if Caesar escaped from their plantation there or from family lands in Brunswick County.

After taking his freedom, Caesar had to pass through untold dangers in order to reach the town of New Bern. The Union army had already captured the town and it had become an important refuge for fugitive slaves from all over eastern North Carolina.

In New Bern, Caesar enlisted in the Union army so that he could fight for his people’s freedom. According to Marion’s research, he enlisted in the 37^th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, in 1864.

While serving in the Union army, Marion’s great-great-grandfather fought in the Battle of Fort Fisher, only a day’s journey from Bolivia.

Caesar Evans had barely turned 19 when he joined the Union army. But after the war, he returned to his old home and found his family again.

He was fortunate. Unlike so many other former slaves who tried to find loved ones after the war, Caesar Evans even located his mother Pleasant and his sister Delia, alive and well. Their owner had sold them away from the rest of the family in 1863, in the second year of the Civil War.

The more Marion spoke, the more I saw the countryside around me in a new way. The more she told me, the more I felt as if I could almost see the people in her stories come back to life.

Feeding the Alligators

We soon stopped at another cemetery and while we wandered among the gravestones Marion told me stories about the people buried there and also more about Caesar Evans and his family.

Only a few years after the Civil War, in 1869, Caesar Evans married Annie Wilson, and they settled down in the pinelands of Brunswick County.

They must have worked hard and been very frugal, because Marion discovered in old documents that Caesar purchased their family’s farmland in Piney Grove in 1881.

As we continued our journey, Marion and I passed the home where she grew up and the home of her charming mother, whom I had the privilege of meeting the next day in Southport.

Then we headed to Supply, a small town a few miles from Bolivia. On the way, we passed a creek where Marion’s school bus driver used to stop the bus and let the children feed the alligators.

Where the Coffles Rested

When we got to Supply, we passed through the little downtown and back into the country, and then Marion turned down a solitary dirt road that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been with her.

A few hundred yards down the road, she stopped and we got out of the car again.

As she always does before going into the woods, Marion grabbed her hatchet in case, she said, wild critters or other varmints attacked her. Marion laughs all the time, but like her grandmama she does not play.

Hatchet in hand, she led me back into the woods to what was obviously a very old cabin built of logs and planks.

The planks in the cabin were cut uneven, by a sawmill that was not of this century or the last, and the logs that made up the walls looked ancient, though I don’t really know if they were as old as they looked.

Marion told me that slave traders used to pass up and down the old King’s Highway, a Colonial road that was nearby.

That I did know. I had read many historical accounts that mentioned that road, and I had read descriptions of the chattels of chained men and women that slave traders used to drive up and down it.

She said that local legend held that the cabin had been one of the places where those slave traders and their coffles rested for the night when they were passing down the King’s Highway.

If the legend is true, I knew that most of those slave traders were taking their captives one of two places: either north to the slave market in Wilmington or south to the big slave market in Charleston, where roughly 160,000 Africans had first arrived in the U.S. in slave ships.

There in the woods, on the edge of that out-of-the-way little town, Marion and I imagined those people there in that cabin. Maybe they sometimes camped around the cabin too, because I have read historical accounts of slave coffles numbering in the hundreds, far too many for that cabin’s floor.

A Graveyard’s Ghost

Near the end of our day, Marion and I also searched in another stretch of woods, closer to Bolivia, for a graveyard that her grandmother Goldie Evans had often described to her.

Marion’s grandmother, who remembered everything and never exaggerated about anything, said that she had seen a ghost there one day when she was a child and walking home from school.

She was not the only one. Over the years, many others had seen the ghost, too.

The spirit, people said, was the ghost of a local white family’s son who died at Gettysburg.

Following her grandmother’s directions, we found the old cemetery in thick woods near the Old Ocean Highway.

Marion, of course, plunged right into the thicket, her hatchet at the ready, ghost or no ghost.

The Landing

When we came out of the woods again, Marion pointed up the road to a little bridge that crossed the Lockwood’s Folly River.

A long time ago, she said, boatmen poled flatboats up the river and came ashore at a little landing that was located near there.

The river is just a little stream by that point, but at the landing, enslaved men would load barrels of turpentine, rosin, tar and pitch.

On large plantations, often of thousands of acres, Brunswick County’s enslaved men and women used to make vast quantities of turpentine, rosin, tar and pitch.  It was by far the county’s largest industry.

They made the turpentine and rosin by distilling the sticky resin of the local pine trees, and they made the tar and pitch by smoldering pine wood in earthen kilns.

After leaving the landing, the boatmen carried the barrels far downriver. They traveled until they reached the salt marshes near the river’s mouth and loaded them onto ships that carried them to sea.

‘A Great Wailing In the Community’

Marion told me a hundred stories. She took me to an incredible number of interesting places. And she taught me a tremendous amount.

We had a ball, too. Everywhere we went, we laughed a lot. But we also asked one another hard questions about the passage of time and how one comes to know a place and how we tell its stories.

As we headed back to Bolivia, we also stopped at her family’s cemetery, the Evans Cemetery, which is located in a copse of pines not far from the Friendship Church.

There we visited her great-great-grandfather’s grave:

CAESAR EVANS

Born 1846

Died

Jan. 8, 1928.

Gone but not forgotten

He died, Marion said, during a great thunderstorm, and when he breathed his last, the old people said that there was, and I quote Marion on this, “a great wailing in the community.”

Next to his final resting place, Marion’s great-great grandmother Annie is buried as well, and a host of Piney Grove’s other citizens, some recent, but others going back many generations.

We visited Marion’s grandmother’s grave, too, which was covered with beautiful red roses. Goldie Evans had passed away only a little more than a year ago, at the age of a 101.

She still carried her rifle on her back well up into her 90s.

As we stood there beneath the pines, Marion said that when she was young, if it was a Sunday morning, you could stand where we were in the graveyard and hear music all around you.

She said you’d hear gospel songs from two or three different churches rising above the fields and mixing with what the old folks called “devil music” that was coming from the revelers at a juke joint down the lane. I suppose the folks at the juke joint had been partying all night.

As she spoke, I could tell that Marion liked it all: the memories of all the saints and all the sinners, too.

She liked the graveyard where her people rested together. She relished the beauty of the fields, the creeks and the swamps where her ancestors had made a home.

She loved the stories that her grandmother and the rest of the old people had entrusted to her and she loved, no less, the memory of that music, the voices of the sacred and profane, all rising up to heaven.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

In the first of his series recognizing February as Black History Month, historian David Cecelski explores the roles two of eastern North Carolina’s black leaders played in the civil rights movement. Read more of Cecelski’s series at davidcecelski.com.

I love this billboard on the site of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I saw it a few years ago, just before the museum opened, and I immediately lit up because it was so nice to see the faces of two extraordinary people from the North Carolina coast in such a place of prominence in the nation’s capital.

I recognized them immediately: Jacquelyn Bond, a 15-year-old civil rights activist from Williamston, and Golden Frinks, a legendary civil rights leader from Edenton, and a compatriot of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the photograph, they are singing at the famous March on Washington where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech Aug. 28, 1963.

The photograph of the two civil rights activists is one of many treasures at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that speak to the history of the North Carolina coast.

I’m back in Washington, D.C., and the museum is now open so I can explore its collections that shed light on North Carolina’s coastal history.

As my way of celebrating Black History Month, I’m going to feature stories about that photograph and eight other artifacts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

I’ll start with that photograph of Jacquelyn Bond and Golden Frinks.

Then, over the next few weeks, I’ll look at some of the museum’s other artifacts related to the history of the North Carolina coast. They’ll include another couple photographs, a postcard, a pin, an old book, a couple of famous lunch counter stools, a painting and a silk linen shawl worn by one of the most important freedom fighters in American history.

So let’s get started and explore the story behind our first photograph, the one of Jacquelyn Bond and Golden Frinks at the March on Washington in 1963.

The Williamston Freedom Movement

When the photograph was taken,  Jacquelyn Bond, later Jacquelyn Bond Shropshire, was only 15 years old. Her hometown, Williamston, was in the throes of a long civil rights struggle that would later be remembered as the Williamston Freedom Movement.

Bond later said that she first heard about the March on Washington while she was in jail in Williamston. She had been arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience when she protested Jim Crow racial segregation by using a “whites only” coin laundromat.

She had a reputation for fearlessness. She walked in the front of protest marches. She did not stop when she saw Klansmen.

When her teachers tried to stop her from joining a protest, she left school and just kept going.

During a civil rights protest earlier in 1963, a deputy sheriff had hit Bond in the stomach with an electric cattle prod. She bore the scar for the rest of her life, but she was undaunted.

That summer of 1963 Bond and other schoolchildren in Williamston stood up to drive-by shootings, Ku Klux Klan attacks and police brutality, including the electric cattle prod that struck Bond.

The young people were unrelenting. As soon as Bond was out of jail, she talked her father, a local grocer, into sponsoring one of three buses that carried Williamston civil rights activists to the March on Washington.

At the March on Washington, Bond, Golden Frinks and those three busloads of mostly black students were among the 250,000 people that witnessed Dr. King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Golden Frinks also played a central role in the Williamston Freedom Movement.

Frinks worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the national civil rights group that Dr. King, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin and other black leaders founded in 1957.

Dr. King asked him to work with the SCLC after Frinks led successful civil rights protests in Edenton, his hometown, in 1960-1962.

As SCLC’s regional field secretary, Frinks seemed to be everywhere in eastern North Carolina in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I can’t even begin to list all of the towns where Frinks played a central role in local civil rights movements: right off the top of my head, in addition to the Edenton Movement ,I can think of Elizabeth City, Plymouth, Washington, Windsor, Bethel, Greenville, Ayden, Robersonville and of course Williamston, just to name a few.

There were 800 arrests of civil rights protestors just in Ayden, a town of only 3,800 people in Pitt County, and it was one of the smaller local movements with which Frinks was involved.

Frinks also played a key role in the Hyde County school boycott in 1968-69, the subject of my first book, Along Freedom Road.

During those civil rights struggles, Frinks was attacked and beaten many times. He saw thousands of protestors go to jail for nonviolent civil disobedience, and he went to jail himself more than 80 times.

He had gotten to know Jacquelyn and the rest of the Bond family during the Williamston Freedom Movement. Earlier that summer of 1963, Frinks and Sarah Small, the president of the local SCLC chapter, had led protest marches in the small town for 32 consecutive days.

Jacquelyn Bond and other young people were at the forefront of those protests.

In our photograph, she and Frinks are singing one of the Freedom Songs that the young activists sang to keep up their spirits during the civil rights protests back home in Williamston.

They sang them at protest meetings that were held in churches, and they sang them while they marched to the county courthouse. They sang them when they were in jail.

The photograph captures something important about where the power and drive of the civil rights movement was coming from in 1963.

Frinks looks watchful, ever vigilant. He looks mindful of all that is happening around the young activists whom he has shepherded to the March on Washington.

Jacquelyn Bond, on the other hand, is totally in the moment. She is holding nothing back. She is drawing from her deepest self, and she is giving it her all, as if God had told her that this, that moment, was her people’s time. That is a woman not afraid of anything on this Earth.

To learn more about the Williamston Freedom Movement, be sure to check out Amanda Hilliard Smith’s “The Williamston Freedom Movement: A North Carolina Town’s Struggle for Civil rights, 1957-1970.”

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I must have heard that phrase a million times when I was younger: “We were working in the logwoods.”

Old men would say it again and again when they remembered their younger days on the North Carolina coast. They talked plenty about farming and fishing and raising families, but they talked just as much about “working in the logwoods.”

Mostly they remembered how hard it was: how hot and how arduous and how dangerous.

I didn’t know much about it then, but I understand now that they were recalling a time when the roar of circular saws and the shrill holler of steam engines could be heard all across our coast.

Back then, lumber mill villages and sprawling logging camps sprang up almost overnight. You’d find them even in the deepest swamps. You’d find them in coastal communities in places that seemed on the edge of the world, like Goose Creek Island and the southern part of the Alligator River.

Over a little more than half a century, roughly from 1870 to 1940, the region’s whole landscape changed: millions of acres of forestlands were clear-cut and all but a few of the region’s old-growth forests vanished.

In those days, the North Carolina coast was home to thousands of loggers and sawmill workers. But they weren’t the only ones “working in the logwoods.” Many a farmer left his fields for at least a few weeks or months a year in the wintertime and trod into the woods, crosscut saw in hand.

Many a fisherman pulled his boat up on the shore and headed into the woods, too.

Sometimes the lumber mill was a giant complex of spinning blades and planers in coastal towns such as Beaufort, New Bern, Oriental, Elizabeth City and Swansboro.

Other times, big mills rose up on the edge of out-of-the-way creeks and rivers, far from any town or village.

I’m thinking of  places such as the Roper Lumber Co.’s big mill that was located on Clubfoot Creek, near my family’s homeplace in Harlowe.

Yet other times the logging crew was simply a handful of men, a stubborn old mule and a two-man crosscut saw. Sometimes sleeping on stumps to stay above the swamp waters, they cut timber and sold it piece-rate to a sawmill maybe run by a neighbor in a backyard shed.

At least half a dozen of my great-uncles and a passel of my cousins worked in the logwoods in Craven and Carteret counties at one time or another.

I’m thinking about all this today because Vann Evans, the photographic archivist at the State Archives in Raleigh, wrote me recently to let me know about a spectacular collection of historical photographs of the lumber industry at the Forest History Society in Durham.

I immediately went through the Forest History Society’s collections in search of photographs from coastal North Carolina.

The Society’s archives includes photographs and manuscripts from across the U.S., but I found quite a few images of logging and lumber mills on our coast. Most were taken in the years from 1900 to 1950.

I’d like to share some of those photographs with you.  I hope you enjoy them. As always, if you see things in the photographs that I didn’t see, or if you know things about the people or places in them that I missed, I’d love to hear from you.

Camp Perry, New Bern

A family in a high-wheeled cart in front of their cabin in a logging camp called Camp Perry near New Bern in 1908. They’re waiting for their driver, a quilt airing on the line. The cabin was  probably an old sharecropper’s home and perhaps also the home of enslaved laborers before the Civil War.

Camp Perry was located on the Roper Lumber Co.’s holdings. Based in Norfolk, Virginia, the company owned outright more than 600,000 acres of forestland, as well as timber rights to 200,000 more acres.

The John L. Roper Lumber Co. seemed to be all over the North Carolina coast in those early years of the 20th century. It had mills in New Bern, Elizabeth City, Belhaven, Roper, Clubfoot Creek and Oriental, as well as near Norfolk and at least three other sites.

At that time, the Roper company was one of the largest lumber businesses in the U.S. Based just on the production at its white cedar mill in Roper, a town in Washington County named after company founder John L. Roper. It was at one time the country’s largest supplier of cedar shingles.

Mules and Log Rafts

Workers resting on a log behind a relatively small slip-tongue logging cart called a “high wheeler,” perhaps near New Bern, 1910. The men used this kind of high-wheeled cart to raise logs off the ground and carry them to a rail line or to a local creek or river where they could be floated to a mill.

In the photograph above, we see woodsmen and their mules getting a larger high wheeler into position to lift a log near New Bern, 1910-11.

A better view from behind of how the loggers used their mules and a slip-tongue logging cart to lift and carry pine logs. This was on the John L. Roper Co.’s timberland near New Bern 1910-13.

Below, we see a raft of yellow (longleaf) pine logs at a mill on either the Trent or Neuse rivers, in New Bern with the conveyor that hauls the logs into the mill in the foreground. The date of the photograph is 1910 or 1911.

At that time, New Bern was largely a lumber port, drawing rafts of logs from distant shores of the Trent and Neuse rivers and shipping most of them to northern seaports. Several large mills operated along the banks of the town’s two rivers, including one of the Roper Lumber Co.’s mills.

Steam and Rail

Taken sometime between 1910 and 1913, this photograph shows loggers using a traveling derrick to load logs onto a car on the Roper Lumber Co.’s railroad near New Bern.

Below, a steam cable skidder in an unidentified forest in North Carolina in 1910. The machine was capable of running a 1,000-foot-long cable into the forest so that the workers could drag logs to the rail line. Building long narrow-gauge rail lines, loggers used steam skidders like this one in swamp forests and other woodlands where the rough ground conditions made it impractical to use oxen, horses or mules.

Below, is a McGiffert log loader in a forest near New Bern, almost certainly on lands owned by the Roper Lumber Co. in 1911. The combination of steam technology and the use of railroads was a critical factor in the lumber boom that swept through the North Carolina coast in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The McGiffert loader drew on both steam power and the rails. Invented by John R. McGiffert circa 1900 and manufactured by the Clyde Iron Works in Duluth, Minnesota, it was a massive, ungainly looking machine that rose off a railroad track and stood on stilts, as it is in this photograph.

The loader’s steam-powered boom lifted logs from either side of the track onto cable-drawn rail cars that passed into the tunnel created when the loader’s platform was raised off the tracks. When its job was done, the loggers removed the stilts and lowered its running wheels back on the track and ran down the rail line to another logging site.

The Great Dismal, the Roanoke & Lake Waccamaw

Below is a hand-colored view down a logging spur in the vicinity of the Great Dismal Swamp in 1922. The forests in the vicinity of the Great Dismal were some of the first areas in the state to be logged intensively. A forester estimated that the second-growth stand shown in this photograph had first been cut around 1800.

Below we see the Halifax Paper Co.’s mill in Roanoke Rapids in 1931. The company was one of the state’s first pulpwood manufacturers, taking largely pine logs, breaking them down into fibers and using them to make paper, cardboard and other products.

Below, is a bark-peeling machine at the Council Tool Co.’s yard in Wananish, in Columbus County in the 1930s. Wananish is now part of the town of Lake Waccamaw.

John P. Council founded the Council Tool. Co. in Wananish in 1884. Originally, he focused on making tools for the turpentine trade and eventually gained 90% of the market for those implements, at least in the U.S.

Still in business today, the Council Tool Co. specializes in making axes, mauls, sledgehammers and other tools particularly for use in forestry and firefighting.

The Council Tool Co. Records in the Archival Collections at North Carolina State’s library provide a fascinating look at one family’s story in the state’s wood products industry over more than 125 years.

Oxen and the Croatan

In this more recent photograph, dated 1940, we see a truck hauling loblolly pine logs down a plank road in the Croatan National Forest.

The Croatan National Forest covers parts of Craven, Carteret and Jones counties. The federal government acquired the area in November 1933.

The first and largest part of the national forest, totaling more than 50,000 acres, was acquired from Interstate Cooperage, a wood products subsidiary of Standard Oil that had a large mill in Belhaven.

Some parts of the Croatan have always been open to commercial logging. Other parts are preserved as wilderness and for recreational use. They include some breathtaking stretches of salt marsh, longleaf pine savanna, hardwood creek bottom and pocosin swamp that are some of my favorite places in the world.

Here we get a close-up of an oxen team used in hauling logs bound for the Smith Lumber Co.’s mill near Smithfield in 1940.

Even in the era of steam and rail, oxen, mules and horses remained indispensable in most logging operations.

I’ve always heard that a good “snake horse,” so-called for their ability to haul logs through winding paths in dense forest and to step deftly over logging chains and lines without breaking stride, was a sight to see.

For most lumber companies, World War II marked the end of the use of oxen, mules and horses in logging operations.

The Strike at Greene Brothers

This is one of the locomotives that the Greene Brothers Lumber Co. in Elizabethtown used to haul logs to its mill in the 1950s.  The train, a Vulcan No. 3195, was built by Vulcan Foundry Limited, a venerable English maker of locomotives that was founded in 1832.

In 1947, Greene Bros. was the site of a long strike and a bloody repression of timber and sawmill workers that had formed a labor union as part of the  Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO’s,  “Operation Dixie” labor organizing campaign in eastern North Carolina.

Then the largest lumber mill in the South, the company paid its African American laborers less than $8 a day for working sunup to sundown. When the loggers and sawmill workers organized in 1947, the company refused to negotiate with their union, leading to a yearlong strike.

Urged on by the “Red Scare,” company supporters lashed out at the striking workers and accused them of being unpatriotic and communists, even though many of them were World War II veterans. Union supporters were fired, arrested, blacklisted, often beaten and sometimes evicted. A car was dynamited and shots fired into bedroom windows.

To learn more about the lumber workers’ strike in Elizabethtown and labor activism elsewhere in North Carolina’s lumber industry in that time period, see my story “Adelle McDowell: A Frightful Time” and most especially Will Jones’ “The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South.”

Note From the Author: Special thanks to Vann Evans at the State Archives of North Carolina and to the Forest History Society for making such wonderful photographs available to the general public. The Forest History Society is a nonprofit library and archive committed to preserving and sharing forest and conservation history. On the website, you can find everything from a digital database of historical photographs and manuscript collections to a middle school curriculum called “If Trees Could Talk.” The Society is located at 2925 Academy Road in Durham.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

To my Swedish-American father-in-law, Karl Hanson.

He would have made a good fisherman if he hadn’t been born in Kansas.

In this photograph (above), we see the blackfish boat Margaret at an unidentified port, probably in southern New Jersey, in 1934. Standing in the bow is Capt. Einar Neilsen, a Norwegian immigrant. He followed the blackfish, also known as tautog or black sea bass, north every summer, but he always returned home to Beaufort, North Carolina, for the winter.

Capt. Neilsen was part of a largely forgotten enclave of Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch fishermen and their families that left New Jersey and made their homes in Beaufort beginning in the 1910s.

Several other historical photographs of Capt. Neilsen and the Margaret shed light on Beaufort’s Scandinavian and Dutch fishing community.

In this photograph (below), Capt. Neilsen is standing at the stern of the Margaret while she is on a boatyard’s railway either for a repair or some kind of routine maintenance, also in 1934.

Both of those photographs come from the National Fisherman Collection at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. Both were taken while Capt. Neilsen and his crew were fishing up north.

In a third photograph (below), provided to me by one of Capt. Neilsen’s grandnephews in Beaufort, the captain (far right) and crew are lounging on the deck of the Margaret.

I love this photograph, but I am not sure if Capt. Neilsen and his crew are in Beaufort, where they fished for blackfish in the winter, or in Wildwood, New Jersey, where they fished for blackfish in the summer.

In a fourth photograph (below), also from Capt. Neilsen’s family, he and his crew are standing on the Margaret next to a wharf that is believed to have been in Beaufort. His brother Pete Neilsen is standing on the far left. Another Norwegian fisherman, Chris Hansen, is on the far right.

In our fifth and final photograph of the Margaret (below), likewise provided to me courtesy of Capt. Neilsen’s family, the captain is sitting on a pail on the bow of the Margaret with his crew. At that time, they were probably at their summer fishing harbor in Wildwood.

Next to the Margaret, we can see the Alice, his brother Thomas Neilsen’s somewhat smaller blackfish boat.

The Immigrants

According to a wonderful article that folklorist Michael Luster wrote for the N.C. History Council’s journal Tributaries in 1991, the first blackfish fishing crews left New Jersey and came south to Beaufort in 1913. They included several Swedes and Norwegians, as well as a Dutchman named Jess Pagels.

Other Scandinavians and another Dutch fisherman or two soon followed them to Beaufort.

The Norwegian brothers Einar, Thomas and Pete were among the first to leave the fishing grounds of southern New Jersey and follow the blackfish south to Beaufort.

Escaping hard economic times and looking for a brighter future, more than 800,000 Norwegians immigrated to America between 1825 and 1925, that amounted to one-third of Norway’s population. Only Ireland lost a greater percentage of its population to the U.S.

While most Norwegian immigrants settled in the Upper Midwest, a significant number also ended up in Brooklyn (especially the Bay Ridge neighborhood) and some of them eventually found their way to the fishing communities of southern and mid-coast New Jersey—to towns such as Wildwood, Barnegat Light and Atlantic City.

Norwegians moved to other fishing ports as well. Immigrants from the Norwegian island of Karmøy, for instance, made up a tremendous part of the scallop fleet in Fairhaven and New Bedford, Mass.

The Blackfish Boats

Einar Neilsen and his brothers were among the Norwegians that settled in Wildwood, New Jersey, and that’s apparently where they first grew familiar with the blackfish fishery.

Blackfishing was not dissimilar to other kinds of hand-line fishing that were common in the North Atlantic all the way from Scandinavia to New England, including the famous cod fishery on Georges Bank.

Then as now, large numbers of blackfish congregated on hard bottoms miles off the coasts of both New Jersey and North Carolina.

Fishermen made the trip offshore in tough, seaworthy vessels such as the Margaret. When the boat reached the fishing grounds, the crew launched several dories. In our first photograph (at the top of this page) you can see the dories stacked on the Margaret’s deck.

The fishermen jigged for the blackfish with hand lines from the dories and returned to the mother boat with their catches.

That’s why the Margaret has that distinctive, double-ended design. Unlike any other large fishing vessel constructed on the North Carolina coast in that day, she was built for the open sea and did not need a rounded or square stern since the Norwegian fishermen were not dragging a trawl, running a long line or hauling a dredge from the back of the boat.

The Margaret was built in Beaufort in 1922, almost certainly at the Whitehurst & Rice Boatworks that used to be located at the end of Ann Street.

That shipyard’s builders were capable, were not at all wedded to local “rack of the eye” boatbuilding traditions and are known to have built at least one other blackfish boat.

They turned out vessels as varied as menhaden boats, sharpies and pleasure boats for New York yachtsmen.

When they built the Margaret, the shipwrights at Whitehurst & Rice apparently copied the design of the blackfish boats that the Scandinavians and Dutchmen first brought south from New Jersey.

A New Home in Beaufort

Capt. Neilsen and the other Scandinavians discovered Beaufort by following the blackfish south. With their fair hair, thick accents and unusual boats, they must have made an impression.

So did their practice of fishing so far out in the Atlantic. Local fishermen did very little offshore fishing in those days.

Most of Beaufort’s commercial fishermen worked in local sounds and rivers. Even in the menhaden fishery, by far the town’s largest fishing industry, the boats rarely ventured more than a few miles into the Atlantic.

Rumors of blackfish grounds south and southwest of Beaufort Inlet had circulated in the local fishing communities for some time, however.

Then, in 1913, the Fish Hawk, a U.S. Fish Commission research vessel, surveyed the local offshore fishing grounds.

That survey found six major blackfish grounds on coral reefs or shell bottom 18-20 miles offshore in a line roughly parallel to the shore and running west from a point almost due south of Beaufort Inlet.

The first Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch fishermen showed up that same year. At first, they probably continued to live in New Jersey and just came south for the blackfish season in the wintertime.

Before long, however, at least some of those fishermen were calling Beaufort home, joining local churches and sending their children to the local schools.

One of my mother’s closest friends in Beaufort High School’s class of 1945, in fact, was Margaret Hansen, one of the Scandinavian fishermen’s children.

“The smartest girl in school,” our friend Betty Motes, who was also in the class of  ’45, told me the other day.

While living in Beaufort, the Scandinavian fishermen still returned to Wildwood in the summertime for the blackfish season up there. While fishing out of Wildwood, they may have stayed with relatives or they may have slept on their boats.

As Michael Luster noted in his Tributaries article, they were not the only Beaufortites that fished out of that part of New Jersey in the summertime.

They must have run into many of Beaufort’s menhaden fishermen, too. Many of the town’s menhaden boats also worked out of fishing towns on that north side of Cape May during the summer.

The Blackfish Fishery’s Last Days

Beaufort’s blackfish fishery faded out in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The two big local fish dealers, Way Brothers and J. H. Potter & Son, had always sent the local blackfish catches almost exclusively to New York City, but the market vanished during the Great Depression.

Many of the Scandinavians remained in Beaufort and found other ways to make a living: some in the fishing business and others as painters and in other trades. Many of their descendants are still an important part of the community.

When Michael Luster was researching his 1991 article, the last of the Scandinavian and Dutch fishermen had already passed away, but he interviewed quite a few of their children.

Similarly, as I looked to understand the blackfish fishery better, I learned a tremendous amount from two of Capt. Thomas Neilsen’s grandsons, Tom Miller and Buddy Hansen.

Their grandfather was one of Capt. Einar Neilsen’s brothers. As I mentioned earlier, Thomas Neilsen was captain of the blackfish boat Alice that we can see tied up next to the Margaret in one of the photographs above.

In conclusion, I can only say that I never cease to marvel at the ways that the sea has connected my home state’s smallest ports and most out-of-the-way fishing villages to the rest of the world, including even the chilly, far-off shores of Norway, Sweden and Holland.

Note from the author: Special thanks to Tom Miller and Buddy Hansen for so generously sharing their family’s history with me. It was a great pleasure to learn from them. I’d also like to thank Mike Alford and Steve Goodwin for their help in researching the Margaret, and Steve Anderson for finding the Scandinavian families in the U.S. Census records at the History Museum of Carteret County in Morehead City, N.C.

I also cannot thank Michael Luster enough for his exceptionally well-researched article, “Fair Hair and Blackfish” that appeared in the October 1991 edition of the N.C. Maritime History Council’s journal, Tributaries.

In addition, I want to thank Douglas Arthur Wolfe, formerly of the NOAA lab in Beaufort. His book “A History of the Federal Biological Laboratory at Beaufort, North Carolina, 1899-1999” was indispensable to understanding the surveys of the blackfish grounds off Beaufort in the early 1900s.

Finally, I want to thank the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, for permission to publish the two photographs of the Margaret.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

This is a single story from the life of a woman named Chloe that was held in slavery at Indian Ridge in Currituck County in the first half of the 1800s. It is only one brief moment in her life, but it is the only one that history has recorded. The passage, though brief, nevertheless says a great deal about her and about the lives of other enslaved women on the North Carolina coast.

These are the words of her son, the Rev. London R. Ferebee, in his 1882 memoir titled “A Brief History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R. Ferebee”:

At an early age my mother was sold. I scarcely can remember the occurrence which took place on the morning she was sold. It was said that all of my people are mixed with Indian blood, and she was a spirited woman and would not suffer to be imposed upon by her master nor mistress.

A dispute arose between my mother and her mistress, and her mistress attempted to strike her, at which mother said “If you strike me, it will be the dearest lick ever you struck,” and at the arrival of the master her mistress of course reported the conduct of my mother.

He, knowing the spirit of my mother, took his gun and cowhide in hand and coming to the kitchen, said with an oath, “Chloe, if you don’t let me whip you for saucing your mistress, I’ll shoot you.”

She (my mother) said, opening her bosom, “Shoot; that’s the only way you can whip me.”

Having at this time come in reach of her, he struck at her with the cowhide. She seized it and cut it in two with a butcher knife which she had been cleaning fish with: they then gathered each other and my mother threw him, and as he fell the gun discharged but injured no one.

She put one knee in his breast, the other, as well as I can now remember, on one arm, wrested the gun from his hand and struck him over the head with the breech, wounding him badly. . . .

For somebody like me, who first learned about the history of American slavery from the old Hollywood classic, “Gone with the Wind,” Chloe’s story reminds me yet again why we should always go back to the original documents when we are seeking to hear the true voices of American history.

Ferebee’s “A Brief History” is not unusual. Firsthand accounts of slavery (written by former slaves) are relatively rare, but the ones we have are full of strong, defiant and dignified African American women such as Chloe.

A Son’s Story

As I said, I found Chloe’s story in “A Brief History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R. Ferebee,” her son’s account of his life.

I used the Rev. London R. Ferebee’s little book 20 years ago when I was writing “The Waterman’s Song” because he was an enslaved boatman and his father, also a slave, worked at least for a time in a shipyard. “The Waterman’s Song” is about slavery and the maritime trades on the North Carolina coast.

This week though I reread Ferebee’s narrative because his life had so many similarities to that of John H. Nichols, who was the subject of my post, “Escape through the Dismal Swamp.”

The Rev. London R. Ferebee was born into slavery in 1849, only a year after Nichols, and his birthplace, Coinjock, is only 50 miles from Nichols’ birthplace in the northern part of Pasquotank County.

Like Nichols, Ferebee escaped and made his way to Union army forces and freedom during the Civil War.

Ferebee learned to read and write at schools in the Union-occupied parts of the North Carolina coast. One of the schools was in New Bern and the other on Roanoke Island, both of which Union troops captured early in the war.

After the war, Ferebee became an A.M.E. Zion minister and teacher. He published his life story in Raleigh in 1882.

When he witnessed this incident involving his mother, he was a small child. That was probably between 1850 and 1852.

The place was a farmhouse in Indian Ridge, south of Shawboro and north of Indiantown Creek, in the remote western corner of Currituck County.

This was the only story about his mother that the Rev. London R. Ferebee told in his narrative. I think we can assume the events described in it were extremely important to him.

The Freedom Church

Chloe’s spirit of defiance and sense of herself is apparent in her son’s story. Unfortunately, we know very little else about her life.

I think we can safely say, however, that she was born sometime around 1820. Like many of the enslaved laborers on that part of the North Carolina coast, she was a descendant of enslaved Africans and of the local indigenous people, probably one of the region’s Algonquin tribes.

According to her son, Chloe married the Rev. Abel M. Ferebee in or about 1837.

Her husband, also an enslaved laborer, was a blacksmith and a Methodist minister in that part of coastal North Carolina. As I mentioned earlier, he worked at least for a time at a shipyard in Elizabeth City, a river town southwest of Indian Ridge.

The Rev. Abel M. Ferebee, Chloe’s husband, played an important role in the founding days of the A. M. E. Zion Church in North Carolina.

Renown for their commitment to the African American freedom struggle, the church’s members in the northern states included Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

The Rev. Abel M. Ferebee was also active in the state’s Equal Rights League, an African American group that advocated for black political rights on the North Carolina coast during and immediately after the Civil War.

According to his and Chloe’s son, “They lived together as man and wife for twenty-two years. The number of their children was ten — seven boys and three girls. . . .. [A] cross word by either of them to each other has never been known by any one.”

A Husband’s Devotion

A woman named Olly Whitehurst held Chloe and her children in slavery. (A different white person owned her husband.)

However, I don’t know if the “mistress” in the story is Olly Whithurst or another woman. In the 1850 federal census, Sally Whitehurst, age 60, is also listed as being in the household. A 21-year-old farmer, Peter Whitehurst, lived with the pair as well.

Only hours after the incident in which Chloe defended herself against her owner’s assault, her beaten owner sold her to a slave trader, a man that bought and sold enslaved people as a business.

According to “A Brief History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R. Ferebee,” Chloe’s husband, despite being a slave, convinced his owner to buy her from the slave trader. In a rather remarkable turn of events, she was soon reunited with her husband and at least some of her children.

The Rev. Abel M. Ferebee may even have come up with the money to purchase Chloe from the slave trader — or at least put down a “deposit” for her while committing to reimburse his owner over time.

Such arrangements were not unknown in that part of the North Carolina coast. African American slaves in the maritime trades, in particular, seem to have been especially adept at finding ways to earn income beyond what they had to surrender to their owners.

For instance, Moses Grandy, who had been an enslaved boat captain in Chloe’s part of the coast earlier that century, described something similar in his “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America,” which was first published in London in 1843.

Chloe died in May 1859. I don’t know the circumstances of her death. As an enslaved person, she had no death certificate, no listing in the “mortality schedule” of the U.S. census and no marked grave.

What we know about her comes down to her spirit of defiance, her sense of dignity and her love for her husband and children.

I don’t even know if she used her husband’s surname (Ferebee), her owner’s surname (Whitehurst) or some other surname. Perhaps she used no surname at all—she may have simply been “Chloe.”

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

“The typical turpentine laborer in Wiregrass Georgia in the 1870s was a young, single … black man from North Carolina.”

I found that sentence in Robert B. Outland’s Ph.D. dissertation, which later became his pioneering book, “Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South,” published by LSU Press in 2004.

Here in North Carolina, naval stores meant turpentine, tar, pitch and rosin. Produced from longleaf pine forests, they gave North Carolina its nickname, “The Tar Heel State.”

Outland’s work chronicled the rise and fall of the naval stores industry, but what really grabbed my attention was this reference to a great migration of North Carolina’s turpentine workers to the naval stores industry in Georgia after the Civil War.

About one group of Georgia’s naval stores workers, he wrote:

“Of 178 turpentine laborers working at (turpentine) camps along the Macon and Brunswick railroad in 1879, 80% were black … and 70% were born in North Carolina.”

Most of those turpentine workers were young, single black men, and many of them had been born in slavery.

African Americans were not the only naval stores workers that went south, though. A large number of black, white and Native American people produced turpentine, tar, pitch and rosin in North Carolina. Many of them all left the state and went south after the Civil War.

They didn’t just go to Georgia’s forests, either.

After the Civil War, they had gone first, in any numbers, to South Carolina’s pinelands, and then to Georgia’s.

Following the pines, they scattered next across the southern states all the way from the Florida Panhandle to East Texas.

Their exodus tells us a great deal about North Carolina’s coastal history if we think about who they were, why they left and where they went, which is what I want to do in today’s post.

The Longleaf Pine Forest

My starting point is the great longleaf pine forest that once covered an estimated 4 to 5 million acres of North Carolina’s coastal plain.  That forest was the foundation of the turpentine trade and the rest of the naval stores industry.

The longleaf pine tree (Pinus palustris) once dominated the forests of coastal North Carolina and it was the source of all of the state’s naval stores — turpentine, tar, pitch and rosin.

From the longleaf pine’s sap, naval stores workers produced turpentine and rosin by chipping off V-shaped sections of bark and collecting the trees’ gummy resin as it oozed out of the tree.

They then distilled that resin to produce “spirits of turpentine,” which in New York markets was sold in at least 10 different grades, each with its own use. Rosin was a by-product of that distillation process.

By burning the longleaf pines’ fallen limbs and other deadwood in earthen kilns, they also produced tar and pitch.

In the Age of Sail, those naval stores were essential for making wooden sailing ships watertight and preserving their planking and lines. Navies and merchant fleets throughout the Western World relied on those products made from North Carolina’s longleaf pine forests.

Naval stores had many others uses, too. Turpentine, in particular, was valued as an illuminant and was widely used in lamps and streetlights in the days before petroleum’s discovery.

The Turpentine State

As every school child here is taught, North Carolina was the capital of the country’s naval stores industry for much of the 1700s and 1800s.

North Carolina wasn’t just the naval stores industry’s capital, it was practically the whole show.

Even as late as 1870, more than 95% of all naval stores produced in the U.S. came from North Carolina’s coastal plain.  The bulk of it came from counties along the Cape Fear River.

By most accounts, North Carolina’s seaports were the largest naval stores exporters in the world, rivaled only by those on the Baltic Sea.

In fact, to the average man or woman on the street in London or Paris, tar and turpentine were in most cases the only things they knew about North Carolina.

To them we were “The Turpentine State” and later, of course, “The Tar Heel State.”

You can learn more about the history of North Carolina’s naval stores industry elsewhere in my writings, by the way, especially in “The Turpentine State” and “Pitch Pines and Tar Burners: A 1792 Account.”

From Richlands to Wilkinson’s Point

I’ve also written a couple of articles that might give you a sense of the size and variety of turpentine operations that were once on the North Carolina coast.

Some turpentine businesses were massive. One of the naval stores operations that I wrote about many years ago was a turpentine plantation in Onslow County, North Carolina, that covered more than 20,000 acres and required the labor of more than 100 enslaved workers.

That was the Averitt family’s Richlands plantation, the location now of the town of Richlands.

That article was called “Oldest Living Confederate Chaplain Tells All? Or, the Rise and Fall of the Richlands.” It first appeared in Coastwatch, North Carolina Sea Grant’s wonderful magazine, and then I did a longer version in Southern Cultures, the journal of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South.

The other story was about a much smaller kind of turpentine producer. It was called “John N. Benners’ Journal: A Saltwater Farmer & His Slaves” and was posted a year and a half ago.

John N. Benners resided on a plantation at Wilkinson’s Point on the Neuse River in Pamlico County.

He was a very common kind of turpentiner. Farming was the plantation’s mainstay, but Benners and three or four enslaved men and women also did a little turpentine collecting, along with other enterprises such as logging and fishing, when they weren’t needed in the fields.

Based on Benners’ diary, none of them worked in his longleaf pine groves more than a few weeks a year.  He probably sent the collected pine resin to New Bern by boat and sold it to a distillery there.

The Destruction of a Forest

As Robert Outland points out in “Tapping the Pines,” North Carolina’s dominance of the nation’s naval stores industry began to change drastically in the decades after the Civil War.

By that time, the industry was destroying the region’s longleaf pine forest. In a frenzied half century of exploitation, the state’s longleaf pine forest fell from an estimated 4 to 5 million acres to less than 60,000 acres.

Travelers began to describe train trips through eastern North Carolina’s pine forests in which they did not see a single tree that did not have the V-shaped scar that was characteristic of tapping.

Between 1870 and 1890, the state’s share of the country’s naval stores market plummeted from 96.7% to 21%.

The longleaf pine forest was succumbing to ax and hack, as well as to insect infestations and diseases caused by the weakening of trees due to being over-tapped.

As the forest faded, turpentine workers, naval stores companies and their barrel, tool and other suppliers left North Carolina and headed to the longleaf pine forests in other parts of the American South.

From Beaufort County to Mobile Bay, Alabama

Some left before the Civil War. As early as the 1840s, a number of turpentine planters left coastal North Carolina and moved as far south as Alabama and Mississippi in search of new longleaf pine forests, sometimes forcing hundreds of enslaved workers to go with them.

In “Tapping the Pines,” for instance, Outland discusses a turpentine planter named James R. Grist.

Grist and his father got their start in the naval stores business in the longleaf pine forests of Beaufort County, North Carolina.

As they used up that “turpentine orchard,” they invested in new longleaf pine lands closer to Wilmington, North Carolina, including a 6,000-acre stand of longleafs in Brunswick County.

As those longleaf groves declined in the 1850s, Grist searched for new pine lands again, this time in other states.

He eventually found them on the Fish River, near Mobile Bay, Alabama. Taken out of North Carolina, a hundred of his enslaved African Americans established a new turpentine plantation there.

A Different Kind of `Great Migration’

The migration — forced and otherwise — of North Carolina turpentiners to other southern states was a trickle in the 1840s and 1850s. After the Civil War, though, it became a torrent.

As they left the Tar Heel State, turpentiners resettled first in South Carolina, then in Georgia and Florida. For a half century, the large number of North Carolinians in those state’s turpentine camps was legendary.

As Outland writes in “Tapping the Pines”:

“It does in fact appear that North Carolina turpentiners and their descendants dominated the industry throughout the South in the late nineteenth century.”

As the decades passed, the longleaf pine forests in those Atlantic coast states declined, too, and the naval stores industry faded there, much as it had already done in North Carolina.

Some of the turpentine workers returned to their old homes in North Carolina. However,  probably far more either stayed in Georgia or Florida and found other ways to make a living or strayed to distant cities during the Great Migration of southern blacks to the northern states.

Yet others uprooted again and followed the naval stores industry to Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Their longleaf pine forests were comparatively unexploited and the rapid construction of railroads was opening up new pine lands in those states.

Yet another generation later, a few of those turpentiners and their descendants made it all the way to the Piney Woods of East Texas, where the South’s great longleaf pine forests finally gave out.

Every experienced genealogist of the American South knows about this “turpentine trail.”

Again and again, genealogists trace family ancestry back along that path of the longleaf pines and the naval stores industry.

Those genealogists may start with a family that lives in Georgia or Mississippi or Texas today.

But following deeds, marriage records and other historical documents, they can often track a family’s ancestry step-by-step back across the southern states. In many cases, they end up eventually on North Carolina’s coastal plain.

Peonage and Prisons

Wherever turpentiners went, their life was not easy. They left North Carolina because times were hard, they had few other options and the naval stores industry was a life they knew.

But naval stores work was always oppressive. Before the Civil War, North Carolina’s turpentine planters used enslaved workers for a reason. The work was hard, insufferably hot and ill compensated.

Peonage, basically slavery, remained an issue for turpentine workers in Georgia and Florida, among other places, well into the 20^th century.

At the time, many observers compared living conditions in those turpentine camps to antebellum slavery. Others compared turpentine camps to prisons.

Beyond the turpentine camps, the outside world was no picnic, either. When North Carolina’s turpentiners arrived at a little crossroads in the piney woods of South Georgia or the Florida Panhandle, they often faced open hostility and a world of dangers.

They were, of course, outsiders — immigrants and strangers. Whether black, white or Native American, they were often treated like second-class citizens and made to feel scorned and unwanted.

Yet they left their homes and came south anyway, so bad had things become in what was left of North Carolina’s longleaf pine forests.

Shadow Memories

The fates of those turpentiners makes me think about a larger problem that I often struggle with as I think about how best to tell the story of the North Carolina coast and its history.

Sometimes it’s a challenge to tell stories about the people who stayed, but I struggle much more to find and hear the voices of the people who left.

I mean, of course, people like so many of the the turpentiners and tar burners that followed the naval stores industry into other southern states and never came back home.

To me their stories matter, too,  and I also find that their stories often shed a great deal of light on the places they left.

Of course, the turpentiners and tar burners were not the only people from North Carolina’s coast that left. Over the generations, far more people left than stayed.

The list of those that left North Carolina’s coastal plain is long: uprooted farmers, the victims of bank closings and land grabs during the Great Depression, whole villages that gave up after the ’33 storm (and a dozen other major storms too), thousands displaced by military base construction and many, many more.

And there were others — well, far too many of the people that lived here left these parts simply because they found this land too oppressive, and found us too close-minded.

All once belonged here, though, and I still think about them. I wonder where they all went and what became of them and where their descendants are now and how they are doing.

I wonder if their grandchildren or great-grandchildren have forgotten their roots here completely. I wonder if the old people still tell stories about us and life here on the North Carolina coast.

I wonder if they remember things that we don’t.

I wonder about simpler things, too. I wonder, for instance, if they still make cornbread like we do or if they put their children to sleep at night with the same lullabies that my grandmother sang to me.

I wonder if they get irresistible cravings for a plate of roast jumpin’ mullet when the prevailing winds shift in the fall, or for muscadine grapes in late summer, as so many of us do, no matter how far from home we may be.

I wonder what other longings they still feel, and what shadow memories they have somehow inherited, and perhaps hold somewhere deep in their bones, that go back to these shores and the once great longleaf pine forests that used to be here and are no more.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I recently found this map in an old book called “The Williams History: Tracing the Descendants in America of Robert Williams, of Ruthin, North Wales, who Settled in Carteret County, North Carolina, in 1763.” The map describes a largely forgotten group of Quaker settlements that flourished on the North Carolina coast more than 200 years ago.

I have strong family roots in that area, so I was aware that Quakers had been among the region’s earliest colonists. But I had never seen anything like this map. For the first time, I could really see the large extent of Quaker settlement in the 1700s in the area on the north side of the Newport River.

That includes the communities that we now call Harlowe, Mill Creek, Black Creek, Core Creek and Ware Creek.

All are located a little west of Beaufort, North Carolina. Most are in Carteret County, though some are just across the county line in Craven County.

A Quaker named John Shoebridge Williams drew the map. He was born at Black Creek, on the lower left of the map, in 1790. He did not make the map until 1864, however, long after he had left the area and moved to Ohio.

He drew the map because he wanted to show his children and grandchildren where he had lived as a child.

Compiled by Milton Franklin Williams, one of his descendants, “The Williams History” was published in 1921.

“The Williams History” included John Shoebridge Williams’ map, as well as some of his letters and reminiscences about the Quaker communities in that part of Carteret and Craven counties.

Today I’m going to look closely at this map to see what it can tell us about those Quakers.

With the help of the documents in “The Williams History,” as well as some others, I’m going to explore the history of those Quakers and of the Africans and African Americans who were at one time enslaved by them and, in many cases, freed by them.

The Clubfoot Creek and Harlowe Creek Canal

Perhaps the most central landmark on the map is the Clubfoot Creek and Harlowe Creek Canal. You can see it running in a north-south direction in the very middle of the map.

It might help you to judge the map’s scale if you keep in mind that the canal is 3.4 miles in length.

The map portrays the region ca. 1799-1800. At that time, enslaved African and African American laborers had just finished digging the canal, which was one of the first ship canals in the American South.

That was before the invention of hydraulic dredges, so the enslaved workers cleared and excavated the route with shovels, axes and mattocks. They dug, but also cut through a thick mat of roots. Often they worked in waist-deep water.

When completed in the late 1790s, the canal provided a passage for shallow draft vessels to travel from the Neuse River to the Newport River, and hence to Old Topsail Inlet and the sea.

The canal was not much more than a broad ditch at that point in time, however. Other enslaved workers would enlarge and deepen the canal further in the 1820s.

To the north of the canal, the map shows two bodies of water, Clubfoot Creek and the Neuse River (Williams spells it “Neus”).

To the south of the canal, the map shows Harlowe Creek, the Newport River and the Atlantic Ocean (really Bogue Sound). All are estuarine waters at that point.

Meetinghouses, Mills and Millponds

Two other important landmarks are the Quaker meetinghouses. The first is the Core Sound Monthly Meeting, which you can find on the right-hand side of the map.

It is located on the road that runs along the north side of the Newport River toward the little seaport of Beaufort.

The other is the Clubfoot Creek Monthly Meeting. You can see it on the central, upper portion of the map. The meetinghouse stood near Clubfoot Creek, a tidal bay on the south shore of the Neuse River. The meetinghouse was just across the county line in Craven County.

Another important feature on the map are the mills and millponds. On the lower left side of the map, John Shoebridge Williams indicated the sites of two millponds and three mills on the north shore of the Newport River.

In the 1790s, those mills were a central part of the local economy. On the far left of the map, you can see the first millpond, which was formed by the damming of Black Creek, a tributary of the Newport River.

That millpond still exists. It is known today as Walkers Millpond, and you can see it from State Road 1154 (the Mill Creek Road).

The map shows a gristmill on the east end of the milldam and a sawmill on the west end.

Robert Williams, the mapmaker’s father, established both of those mills. After his death in 1790, his neighbor, William Fisher, operated at least one of them.

On the map, you can see Fisher’s plantation just east of Black Creek.

Timber, Naval Stores and Salt Works

Robert Williams was one of the central figures in the local Quaker community. A Welsh immigrant, he had settled in Carteret County in the 1760s, lured to the region by its extensive old-growth forests and the prospects of making a living from the lumber and naval stores trades.

The map shows the site of the Williams family’s plantation just east of the millpond on Black Creek.’

According to family papers and other local records, Robert Williams’ plantation included the two mills, roughly 1,200 acres of land, at least one seagoing vessel and several hundred enslaved laborers.

In addition, he owned a salt works in Beaufort, 9 miles to the east, and general mercantile stores in Beaufort and New Bern.

The port of New Bern was situated on the Neuse River, roughly 40 miles to the northwest, and was the seat of Craven County. The Williams plantation was located on a road that led to New Bern.

The Rhode Island Connection

If you follow the Newport River downstream, you’ll find another millpond on the map. It’s roughly 3 miles east of Black Creek and was known as Borden’s Millpond.

One of the region’s earliest colonists, a Quaker named William Borden (1689-1749), had formed the millpond by damming what became known as Borden’s Creek.

That millpond no longer exists. Today the creek is known simply as “Mill Creek,” as is the modern-day community there.